A Product Family Approach to Graceful Degradation

Design of gracefully degrading systems, where functionality is gradually reduced in the face of faults, has traditionally been a very difficult and error-prone task. General approaches to graceful degradation are typically limited to re-implementation of the system for a number of pre-designated fallback configurations. We describe an architecture-based approach to gracefully degrading systems based upon Product Family Architectures (PFAs) combined with automatic reconfiguration. A PFA is a region of a system design space populated by different, but related, products sharing similar architectures and components. Each system instance within a PFA yields a distinct price/performance point, and represents a different model in the product family. The unifying mechanism that joins PFAs and gracefully degrading systems is automatic reconfiguration

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: IFIP
• Authors: William Nace, Phil Koopman
• Keywords: Automatic Reconfiguration, Embedded Systems, IFIP 2000, Product Family, Programming Languages