Explicit Representation of Exception Handling in the Development of Dependable Component-Based Systems

Exception handling is a structuring technique that facilitates the design of systems by encapsulating the process of error recovery. In this paper, we present a systematic approach for incorporating exceptional behaviour in the development of component-based software. The premise of our approach is that components alone do not provide the appropriate means to deal with exceptional behaviour in an effective manner. Hence the need to consider the notion of collaborations for capturing the interactive behaviour between components, when error recovery involves more than one component. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated in terms of the case study of the mining control system

Study of fault-tolerant software technology

Presented is an overview of the current state of the art of fault-tolerant software and an analysis of quantitative techniques and models developed to assess its impact. It examines research efforts as well as experience gained from commercial application of these techniques. The paper also addresses the computer architecture and design implications on hardware, operating systems and programming languages (including Ada) of using fault-tolerant software in real-time aerospace applications. It concludes that fault-tolerant software has progressed beyond the pure research state. The paper also finds that, although not perfectly matched, newer architectural and language capabilities provide many of the notations and functions needed to effectively and efficiently implement software fault-tolerance

Architectural mismatch tolerance

The integrity of complex software systems built from existing components is becoming more dependent on the integrity of the mechanisms used to interconnect these components and, in particular, on the ability of these mechanisms to cope with architectural mismatches that might exist between components. There is a need to detect and handle (i.e. to tolerate) architectural mismatches during runtime because in the majority of practical situations it is impossible to localize and correct all such mismatches during development time. When developing complex software systems, the problem is not only to identify the appropriate components, but also to make sure that these components are interconnected in a way that allows mismatches to be tolerated. The resulting architectural solution should be a system based on the existing components, which are independent in their nature, but are able to interact in well-understood ways. To find such a solution we apply general principles of fault tolerance to dealing with arch itectural mismatche

Fault Injection for Embedded Microprocessor-based Systems

Microprocessor-based embedded systems are increasingly used to control safety-critical systems (e.g., air and railway traffic control, nuclear plant control, aircraft and car control). In this case, fault tolerance mechanisms are introduced at the hardware and software level. Debugging and verifying the correct design and implementation of these mechanisms ask for effective environments, and Fault Injection represents a viable solution for their implementation. In this paper we present a Fault Injection environment, named FlexFI, suitable to assess the correctness of the design and implementation of the hardware and software mechanisms existing in embedded microprocessor-based systems, and to compute the fault coverage they provide. The paper describes and analyzes different solutions for implementing the most critical modules, which differ in terms of cost, speed, and intrusiveness in the original system behavio

Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER)

The Parallel Architectures for Planetary Exploration Requirements (PAPER) project is essentially research oriented towards technology insertion issues for NASA's unmanned planetary probes. It was initiated to complement and augment the long-term efforts for space exploration with particular reference to NASA/LaRC's (NASA Langley Research Center) research needs for planetary exploration missions of the mid and late 1990s. The requirements for space missions as given in the somewhat dated Advanced Information Processing Systems (AIPS) requirements document are contrasted with the new requirements from JPL/Caltech involving sensor data capture and scene analysis. It is shown that more stringent requirements have arisen as a result of technological advancements. Two possible architectures, the AIPS Proof of Concept (POC) configuration and the MAX Fault-tolerant dataflow multiprocessor, were evaluated. The main observation was that the AIPS design is biased towards fault tolerance and may not be an ideal architecture for planetary and deep space probes due to high cost and complexity. The MAX concepts appears to be a promising candidate, except that more detailed information is required. The feasibility for adding neural computation capability to this architecture needs to be studied. Key impact issues for architectural design of computing systems meant for planetary missions were also identified

Modeling and Verification of Dependable Electronic Power System Architecture

AbstractThe electronic power system can be viewed as a system composed of a set of concurrently interacting subsystems to generate, transmit, and distribute electric power. The complex interaction among sub-systems makes the design of electronic power system complicated. Furthermore, in order to guarantee the safe generation and distribution of electronic power, the fault tolerant mechanisms are incorporated in the system design to satisfy high reliability requirements. As a result, the incorporation makes the design of such system more complicated. We propose a dependable electronic power system architecture, which can provide a generic framework to guide the development of electronic power system to ease the development complexity. In order to provide common idioms and patterns to the system *designers, we formally model the electronic power system architecture by using the PVS formal language. Based on the PVS model of this system architecture, we formally verify the fault tolerant properties of the system architecture by using the PVS theorem prover, which can guarantee that the system architecture can satisfy high reliability requirements

An environment for object-oriented real-time system design

A concise object-oriented method for the development of real-time systems has been composed. Hardware components are modelled by (software) base objects; base objects are controlled by a hierarchy of coordinator objects, expressed in an organizational diagram. The behaviour of objects is specified by state transition diagrams. This approach considerably promotes requirements analysis and communication with the customer. A CASE tool has been constructed with diagram editors for graphical specifications of real-time systems. The tool can generate executable code for PLCs from these graphical specifications; reuse of previous results is supported by the repository function of the tool. Experiences attained in practice with method and tool show that time spent in system testing and installation is reduced considerabl