Paper Title
Reliability Assessment of Combined Hardware-Software Time Critical Software Systems: Issues and Challenges

Abstract
Although there exists several models for estimating the reliability value of software and hardware yet very few of them consider in compatibility issues and failure dependencies between software and hardware systems. Most of the models consider either pure hardware failure or pure software failure leading to system failure. Neither do they consider hardware related software failures nor software related hardware failures. Also they do not consider the incompatibility issues resulting in system failures. This paper discusses drawbacks, deficiencies and limitations of various existing approaches and finally suggests suitable strategies for the effective reliability assessment of time critical software systems comprising of hardware failure, software failure, hardware related software failure etc. Keywords - Reliability, Time Critical Software Systems, Components, Subcomponents.