Abstract
Hardware-software co-design systems abound in diverse modern application areas such as automobile control, telecommunications, big data processing and cloud computing. Reliability of a hardware-software co-design system relates to why, when and how system hardware or software failures occur. Existing works on reliability modeling of such co-design systems have mostly assumed hardware and software subsystems behave independently of each other. However, these two subsystems may have significant interactions in practice. In this thesis, we develop Markov and integration based approaches to analyze reliability of hardware-software co-design systems considering interactions between hardware and software during the system performance degradation and failure process. The proposed integration approach is applicable to arbitrary types of time-to-failure distributions. Case studies on systems without and with warm standby sparing are performed to illustrate the proposed methodologies. Effects of different component parameters on system performance are also investigated through examples..