Information-based risk assessment software architecture

Effective system management requires a thorough understanding of risks. As more systems depend on software to provide their functionalities, the need to assess the contribution of software to the risks of such systems becomes inevitable. This paper presents a framework for developing a risk assessment tool that aims to assist users in identifying hazards and risks associated with software and their impacts on its entire system and environment. Our approach employs several modules based on relevant information about the system conditions and environments, a holistic view of a specific application system, hardware fault models, and a library of software component risk profiles. We describe the framework architecture that integrates these information-based modules with inference and task modules to support automated reasoning for risk assessment and analysis. The paper discusses our ongoing preliminary research including the detailed architecture of the proposed framework, its components and utilization, and future directions of this work.