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

Abstract : 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.