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NASA’s Springer Journal Publishes Ashok Srivistava and Johann Schumann’s Paper on Software Health Management

Ashok Srivastava and Johann Schumann’s “Software Health Management: A Necessity for Safety Critical Systems” was published by NASA’s Springer Journal’s Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering. The paper addresses the motivation, needs, and requirements of software health management as a new discipline and motivates the need for software health management in safety-critical applications.

BACKGROUND: As software and software-intensive systems are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, the impact of failures can be tremendous. In some industries, such as aerospace, medical devices, or automotive, such failures can cost lives or endanger mission success. Software faults can arise due to the interaction between software, hardware, and the operating environment. Unanticipated environmental changes lead to software anomalies that may have significant impact on the overall success of a mission. Latent coding errors can at any time during system operation trigger faults despite the fact that a significant effort has usually been expended in Verification and Validation (V&V) of the software system. Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly more apparent that pre-deployment V&V is not enough to guarantee that a complex software system meets all safety, security, and reliability requirements.

Software Health Management (SWHM) is a new field concerned with the development of tools and technologies to enable automated detection, diagnosis, prediction, and mitigation of adverse events due to software anomalies while the system is in operation. The prognostic capability of SWHM to detect and diagnose failures before they happen will yield safer and more dependable systems in the future.

NASA PROGRAM FUNDING: A NASA Research Announcement grant: Tools and Techniques for Software and System Health Management, and the Office of Safety and Mission Assurance Software Assurance Research Program: Advanced Tools and Techniques for Verification and Validation of Integrated Vehicle Health Management Systems

Contact: Johann Schumann

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