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Imperfect Fault Coverage
Many systems especially those used in life‐critical or mission‐critical applications such as aerospace, flight controls, nuclear plants, data storage systems and communication systems are fault‐tolerant systems (FTSs) [1, 2]. An FTS can continue to perform its function correctly even in the presence of software errors or hardware failures [3, 4]. Its development typically requires using certain form of redundancy and an automatic reconfiguration and recovery mechanism to restore the system function in the case of the occurrence of a component failure. The mechanism itself (involving fault detection, fault location, fault isolation, and fault recovery) is often not perfect; it can fail such that the system cannot adequately detect, locate, isolate or recover from a component fault happening in the system. The uncovered component fault may propagate through the system and further cause the failure of the entire system or subsystem in spite...