Principles of building dependable billing information systems in housing and communal services

Abstract

Housing and communal services (hereinafter - housing and communal services) is one of the most important areas of the socio-economic structure of society. The quality of the provided housing and communal services directly affects people's need for comfortable living conditions, and also allows creating an environment for the implementation of the principles of a socially oriented economy. Billing or a system of payments for services provided is the basis for the functioning of housing and communal services. In the modern world, calculations are impossible without the use of specialized information systems. The most important component of using such systems is the level of reliability and security of services and components implemented using computer technology. This situation is due to the fact that an insufficient level of reliability and security of information systems leads to material losses, a decrease in competitiveness, a narrowing of sales markets, as well as to more serious consequences associated with the death of people, man-made disasters, etc. Reliability theory has developed well in relation to technical systems. However, the arsenal of its methods and assessment tools as applied to service-oriented structures and software is not effective enough. This is due to the fact that the methods of the classical theory of reliability cannot adequately describe objects, the performance of which can be impaired not only by failures of a physical nature, but also be the result of software errors, information influences, etc. The author has applied a risk-based approach to the definition of fault tolerance and uses the term “dependability” (reliability in a broad sense). For the design of billing information systems, the author proposes to use the mechanism of a dynamically configurable infrastructure developed by him, which makes it possible to provide the required services that can be reasonably trusted. Improving the availability of critical nodes of the information infrastructure provides the required level of elasticity to failures, minimizes recovery time and ensures business continuity.