Reliability Analysis of Pipe and Filter Architecture Style

Architecture–based reliability analysis is necessary for a software application that is developed using the component–based software development paradigm. Prevalent architecture–based analysis techniques represent the application architecture by a Markov process, which may be adequate in the context of an application with a general– purpose architecture. The Markov process, however, is not adequate to represent the architecture of an application which follows a specific architecture style, and hence prevalent techniques cannot be used to analyze the reliability of such an application. In this paper we develop a reliability analysis methodology for an application which follows one such architecture style, namely, the pipe and filter architecture style. We consider two variants of the topological organization of the pipes and filters in an application. In the first variant the pipes and filters are organized into a linear topology, whereas the second variant consists of a linear topology with a feedback loop. The objective of the reliability analysis methodology is to develop an analytical function which expresses the overall application reliability in terms of the reliabilities of the pipes and filters, and the characteristics of the topological organization of the pipes and filters. We illustrate the potential of the methodology to obtain a reliability estimate as well as to facilitate sensitivity analysis for a Document Analysis and Understanding Application which follows the pipe and filter architecture style. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive effort to combine two mature, yet independent research areas, namely, software reliability analysis and software architecture.