Andrea Bobbio

This article discusses model-driven methods with analytic-numeric solutions. In addition to traditional non-state-space and state-space methods, multilevel methods are explored using real case studies. Challenges met while developing and solving dependability models of real systems are listed, and some solutions are outlined.

The wide use of IT resources to assess and manage the recent COVID-19 pandemic allows to increase the effectiveness of the countermeasures and the pervasiveness of monitoring and prevention. Unfortunately, the literature reports that IoT devices, a widely adopted technology for these applications, are characterized by security vulnerabilities that are difficult to manage at the state level. Comparable problems exist for related technologies that leverage smartphones, such as contact tracing applications, and non-medical health monitoring devices. In analogous situations, these vulnerabilities may be exploited in the cyber domain to overload the crisis management systems with false alarms and to interfere with the interests of target countries, with consequences on their economy and their political equilibria. In this paper we analyze the potential threat to an example subsystem to show how these influences may impact it and evaluate a possible consequence.

Epistemic uncertainty analysis accounts for inaccurate input parameters and evaluates how such uncertainty propagates to output measures. In this work we will focus on Weibull distributions, in particular the one related to the reliability of multi-core systems-on-chips. We focus on a two-core system in which, when one of the cores fails, the other can take care of all the systems' tasks. However, this results in an increased operational temperature that leads to a reduced lifetime. We first discuss the epistemic uncertainty distribution that we expect when we estimate the scale parameter of a Weibull distribution from a limited set of samples. We then extend the procedure to consider the epistemic uncertainty in the two core system-on-chip when we can measure the failure times of the first and of the second core.

Reliability and Availability Engineering - August 2017