On-line Testing of Software Components for Diagnosis of Embedded Systems

This paper studies the dependability of component-based applications, especially embedded ones, from the diagnosis point of view. The principle of the diagnosis technique is to implement inter-component tests in order to detect and locate the faulty components without redundancy. The proposed approach for diagnosing faulty components consists of two main aspects. The first one concerns the execution of the inter-component tests which requires integrating test functionality within a component. This is the subject of this paper. The second one is the diagnosis process itself which consists of the analysis of inter-component test results to determine the fault-state of the whole system. Advantage of this diagnosis method when compared to classical redundancy fault-tolerant techniques are application autonomy, cost-effectiveness and better usage of system resources. Such advantage is very important for many systems and especially for embedded ones.