Selecting Fault Tolerant Styles for Third-Party Components with Model Checking Support

Junguo Li (1) , Xiangping Chen (1) , Gang Huang (1) , Mei Hong (2) , Franck Chauvel (1)

1 EECS - School of Electronics Engineering and Computer Science [Beijing]
2 DIT-UPPSALA - Department of Information Technology

To build highly available or reliable applications out of unreliable third-party components, some software-implemented fault-tolerant mechanisms are introduced to gracefully deal with failures in the components. In this paper, we address an important issue in the approach: how to select the most suitable fault-tolerant mechanisms for a given application in a specific context. To alleviate the difficulty in the selection, these mechanisms are abstracted as Fault-tolerant styles (FTSs) at first, which helps to achieve required high availability or reliability correctly because the complex interactions among functional parts of software and fault-tolerant mechanism are explicitly modeled. Then the required fault-tolerant capabilities are specified as fault-tolerant properties, and the satisfactions of the required properties for candidate FTSs are verified by model checking. Specifically, we take application-specific constraints into consideration during verification. The satisfied properties and constraints are evidences for the selection. A case study shows the effectiveness of the approach.

Mots clés: Fault tolerance; model checking; fault-tolerant style; software architecture.; software architecture

Domaines: Génie logiciel [cs.SE]

Junguo Li, Xiangping Chen, Gang Huang, Mei Hong, Franck Chauvel. Selecting Fault Tolerant Styles for Third-Party Components with Model Checking Support. International SIGSOFT Symposium on Component-based Software Engineering (CBSE), Jun 2009, East Stroudsburg, United States. ⟨inria-00459608⟩