Self-adjusting Component-Based Fault Management

The Trust4All project aims to define an open, component-based framework for the middleware layer in high-volume embedded appliances that enables robust and reliable operation, upgrading and extension. To improve availability of each individual application in a Trust4All system, we propose a runtime configurable fault management mechanism (FMM) which detects deviations from given service specifications by intercepting interface calls. There are two novel contributions associated with FMM. First, when repair is necessary, FMM picks a repair action that incurs the best tradeoff between the success rate and the cost of repair. Second, considering that it is rather difficult to obtain sufficient information about third party components during their early stage of usage, FMM is designed to be able to accumulate appropriate knowledge, e.g. the success rate of a specific repair action in the past and rules that can avoid a specific failure, and self-adjust its capability accordingly