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Software Reliability

AMBER

(Assessing, Measuring, and Benchmarking Resilience)

Principal Investigator: Prof Lorenzo Strigini

Contact People:  Prof Lorenzo Strigini

Funding Source: FP7 Coordination Action

Funding: Euro 136,000

Duration: January 2008 - December 2009

Summary and objectives:

AMBER will bring together leading research teams on assessment, measurement, and benchmarking of resilience in computer systems in order to coordinate the effort of defining metrics and benchmarks for comparative evaluation of the resilience of computer systems and components. The consortium includes seven partners (universities of Coimbra, Budapest, City, Chalmers, Florence, and Newcastle and the company ResilTech) from five EU countries, which constitute core research groups on resilience assessment, and relies on a large and representative Advisory Board that constitutes the necessary link between the coordination action and the influential parties in industry and government, thus ensuring that the views of major stake-holders are being taken into account by the AMBER Consortium.

Goals: AMBER aims to coordinate the study of resilience measuring and benchmarking in computer systems and components, fostering European research in order to address the big challenges on resilience assessment posed by current and forthcoming computer systems and computer-based infrastructures. Key objectives of AMBER are:

  • build consensus on common understanding, methodologies and practices for resilience assessment;
  • integrate and coordinate European research and practice on resilience assessment;
  • establish a resilience assessment and benchmarking research forum through AMBER web portal;
  • build and maintain a repository to analyse and share resilience measurement data,including field data on failures in real systems and experiment results;
  • foster the effective transfer of resilience assessment best practices to European industry, namely contribute to the acceptance and adoption of resilience benchmarks by industry;
  • promote the proposal of standards for resilience assessment and benchmarking;
  • define a research agenda on the key topics for enhancing and advancing European research and industry on assessing resilience and benchmarking resiliency of systems and infrastructures.

The AMBER project has now concluded. Some of the contributions of the CSR members to the AMBER outputs are as follows:

  • The following chapters of the State-of-the art report: "Resilience, Fault Tolerance, Resilience Engineering and its Assessment"; "Human Factors"; "Online Monitoring" and "Safety and Assurance Cases"
  • The following Teaching Units of the AMBER learning material: "Introduction to Probabilistic Assessment of Software Reliability", "Techniques for Software Reliability Assessment", "Quantifying the Effects of the Human Component on Dependability and Resilience" and "Introduction to Common-mode Failure Probabilities and Diversity".
  • The invited talk "Resilience Assessment and Dependability Benchmarking: the Challenge of Prediction", presented by Prof Lorenzo Strigini at the DSN 2008 workshop on Resilience Assessment and Dependability Benchmarking

We welcome your feedback, please mail any comments/suggestions to webadm@soi.city.ac.uk
version 2.8 Published: 1st Nov 2011