A novel evidential reasoning based method for software trustworthiness evaluation under the uncertain and unreliable environment

Many software trustworthiness evaluation (STE) problems include both quantitative and qualitative indicators with unreliability and various kinds of uncertainties. In this paper, a novel evidential reasoning (ER) based STE method is developed to model these problems. Considering the reliability of objective and subjective trustworthiness evaluations, two discounting factor estimation approaches to STE are proposed to meet the demands of the unreliable trustworthiness evaluations pretreatment. In order to characterize the degree of evaluation unreliability, the utility theory based trustworthiness evaluation distance is constructed to characterize the degree of evaluation. An intelligent software embedded in the liquid metal detection system is evaluated by the ER based STE method to demonstrate its detailed implementation process, and its validity and applicability. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.