The effect of the transient faults in dependability prediction

Markov chain models are used to evaluate the dependability properties (reliability, safety, availability, maintainability etc.) of the mission-critical systems. Dependability models are often focused only on the basic stuck-at faults. On the other hand the transient faults are present in the operational environment but not included in the dependability prediction. The aim of this paper is to show how the transient faults influence the dependability prediction using the Markov chain model. In this paper basic TMR Markov chain model using stuck-at faults is compared to our extended TMR model considering both the stuck-at and transient faults. The main focus is given on the calculation of the dependability parameter lambda (i.e. the failure rate of the system).