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Benefits

  • Identifies weak spots and fault-sensitive pathways in the architecture before implementation
  • Enables early corrections to redundancy and clustering strategies
  • Reveals hidden multi-point failure interactions rarely visible in traditional simulation
  • Helps optimize recovery time and operational continuity
  • Improves system utilization and load balancing during degraded operation
  • Supports risk-aware resource planning without hardware prototypes

The Failure Analysis library in VisualSim Architect evaluates the behavior and resilience of a system when faults occur across electronics, electrical, mechanical, software, networking, RTOS and power subsystems. It provides a structured method to quantify system impact, loss of performance, load-balancing degradation, downtime and recovery efficiency when the system encounters one or more faults.

The focus is on testing system configurations and architecture choices, identifying single-point, lateral and multi-point failures, and determining how quickly and correctly the system transitions to a safe condition and returns to service. Rather than validating compliance standards, this library quantifies real operational risk and architecture robustness.

Overview

The Failure Analysis library contains components that:

  • Inject static failures (permanent loss of resource)
  • Inject dynamic failures (intermittent, probabilistic or conditional failures)
  • Apply MTBF and MTTR parameters to control shutdown and service restoration timelines
  • Evaluate degraded-mode performance, correctness and load distribution
  • Capture diagnostic and alarm propagation timing
  • Measure architectural weak points and recovery bottlenecks

The same failure types as Functional Safety are supported, but the emphasis here is on system performance, availability, degradation and restoration paths rather than certification response correctness.

Supported Failure Categories

  • Hardware failures — core crash, memory corruption, accelerator disablement, interconnect routing error
  • Software failures — deadlocks, invalid state transitions, API lock ups, broken execution cycles
  • Network failures — link drop, packet loss, QoS collapse, redundant path unavailability
  • RTOS/Scheduling failures — delayed tasks, incorrect scheduling tables, missed deadlines
  • Power failures — power generator overload, rail drop, insufficient supply capacity, battery fade

Key Parameters

  • Failure_Type — static, dynamic, intermittent, sequential, cascade
  • Failure_Initiation — probability-driven, event-triggered or environmental-triggered
  • MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) — expected interval between failures
  • MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) — time to restore resource or service
  • Degraded_Mode_Profile — operational limits allowed while recovering
  • Recovery_Sequence — restart, reconfigure, degrade or switch-over
  • Criticality_Level — safety-critical, mission-critical, best-effort
  • Load_Balancing_Strategy — method of resource redistribution under failure
  • Deadline_Sensitivity — deterministic vs. non-deterministic operations during failure
  • Alarm/Diagnostics_Routing — time window to deliver fault indicators

Analysis and Reports

  • Time to enter safe mode vs. time to return to service
  • Impact of failures on throughput, latency and utilization
  • Load balancing effectiveness under reduced resource conditions
  • Diagnostic/alert propagation correctness within time budget
  • Comparison of failure architectures (replication vs. clustering vs. voting)
  • System availability metrics under MTBF + MTTR constraints
  • Worst-case scenario analysis for multi-fault environments

Applications

  • Architecture trade-off analysis for mission-critical and high-availability systems
  • Design exploration of redundancy, clustering and graceful degradation
  • Availability planning for industrial, aerospace, automotive and defense systems
  • Identifying single-point-of-failure and hidden dependent-failures
  • Determining the best set of resources to remain active during power-limited or degraded operation
  • Evaluating performance-under-failure for deterministic and real-time applications

Integrations

  • Stochastic Resource Model for failure injection
  • Scheduling / RTOS model for task migration and restart techniques
  • Power Management & Power Profiles for reduced-capacity operation scenarios
  • Network & Traffic Modeling for failure-driven congestion and rebalancing
  • Thermal & Electrical / Mechanical models for cascading failure effects
  • Functional Safety library for joint safety-plus-reliability studies

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