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Architecting Fault Tolerant Systems

Lookup NU author(s): Professor Alexander RomanovskyORCiD

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Abstract

Building trustworthy (dependable) systems is a major challenge faced by software developers. To this end, various fault tolerance mechanisms have been developed by researchers and used in industry. Unfortunately, more often than not these solutions ignore earlier development phases - most importantly, the architecture design to exclusively focus on the implementation instead. This creates a dangerous gap between the requirement to build dependable (and fault tolerant) systems and the failure to address these issues at any stage preceding the implementation step.Software Architecture has been widely accepted as a way to achieve a better software quality while reducing the time and cost of production. While typical architectural specifications model only the normal behaviour of the system, ignoring the abnormal ones, several approaches have recently been developed which break the wrong pattern.The aim of this paper is to survey the existing approaches to architecting fault tolerant systems, offering its readers a clear picture of the state of the art research in this emerging area. This survey is built on developing a two-dimensional classification of the existing solutions: the first dimension is based on the traditional software engineering characteristics while the second one uses fault tolerance-related parameters. The paper analyses the major trends and identifies possible directions for future research.


Publication metadata

Author(s): Muccini H, Romanovsky A

Publication type: Report

Publication status: Published

Series Title: School of Computing Science Technical Report Series

Year: 2012

Pages: 65

Print publication date: 01/07/2012

Source Publication Date: July 2012

Report Number: 1343

Institution: School of Computing Science, University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Place Published: Newcastle upon Tyne

URL: http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/publications/trs/papers/1343.pdf


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