Architecting Health Management into Software Component Assemblies: Lessons Learned from the ARINC-653 Component Mode

Complex real-time software systems require an active fault management capability. While testing, verification and validation schemes and their constant evolution help improve the dependability of these systems, an active fault management strategy is essential to potentially mitigate the unacceptable behaviors at run-time. In our work we have applied the experience gained from the field of Systems Health Management towards component-based software systems. The software components interact via well-defined concurrency patterns and are executed on a real-time component framework built upon ARINC-653 platform services. In this paper, we present the lessons learned in architecting and applying a two-level health management strategy to assemblies of software components.