Engineering fault tolerance

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The scope and complexity of computer-based and controlled systems continue to increase dramatically. Modern software must satisfy an increasing number of requirements, provide real-time functionality, and has to interact with other software systems in a heterogeneous and changing environment. More and more responsibility of providing critical functionality is assumed by software, and hence the consequences of such systems behaving in an unpredictable way can be considerable. To successfully build such dependable "systems of systems", applications have to be engineered in such a way that they can provide service in spite of faults. They must be able to tolerate unexpected behavior of external entities in their environment, unreliable underlying components, communication failures, erroneous data and faulty algorithms.The goal of this continuing discovery grant project is to address this situation by integrating the concern of fault tolerance into the entire software development cycle following a model-driven approach. The overall benefits of a fault tolerance-aware process are considerable. Having fault tolerance in mind from the beginning allows software developers to "engineer" support for fault tolerance. It makes it possible to discover the need for fault tolerance early on, get valuable feedback from the client as early as possible, make informed decisions or tradeoffs and set priorities between reliability and safety, state the required levels of fault tolerance for different parts of the system precisely, and then choose the appropriate models, design and infrastructure to achieve it. A well-defined and guided process helps reducing the complexity of fault tolerance, results in more efficient use of the most appropriate fault tolerance models where they are needed, and hence the resulting software architecture, design and code are clear and readable, easy to maintain and deliver adequate performance.