Incremental Fault-Tolerant Design in an Object-Oriented Setting

With the increasing emphasis on dependability in complex, distributed systems, it is essential that system development can be done gradually and at different levels of detail. In this paper we propose an incremental treatment of faults as a refinement process on object-oriented system specifications. An intolerant system specification is a natural ion from which a fault-tolerant system can evolve. With each refinement step a fault and its treatment are introduced, so the fault-tolerance of the system increases during the design process. Different kinds of faults are identified and captured by separate refinement relations according to how the tolerant elates to abstract properties of the intolerant one in terms of safety and liveness. The specification language utilized is object-oriented and based upon first-order predicates on communication traces. Fault-tolerance refinement relations are formalized within this framework. Keywords Fault-tolerance, formal methods, refinement, trace s...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: APAQS
• Authors: Einar Broch Johnsen, Olaf Owe, Ellen Munthe-Kaas, Jüri Vain
• Keywords: APAQS 2001, Fault-tolerance Refinement Relations, Refinement Relations, Separate Refinement Relations, Software Engineering