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| Author(s): |
Patrick Henrique da Silva Brito
Total Authors: 1
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| Document type: | Doctoral Thesis |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Computação |
| Defense date: | 2009-05-15 |
| Examining board members: |
Cecília Mary Fischer Rubira;
Itana Maria de Souza Gimenes;
Eliane Martins;
Ricardo de Oliveira Anido;
Taisy Silva Weber
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| Advisor: | Cecília Mary Fischer Rubira |
| Abstract | |
The incorporation of fault tolerance into systems normally increases their complexity, which consequently makes their analysis more difficult. Moreover, the use of exception handling mechanisms to develop robust software systems in a non-systematic manner can be a source of many design faults. This thesis presents a rigorous and architecture-centric development approach for developing fault-tolerant software systems. Depending on the fault model and the resources available, different architectural abstractions can be employed for representing issues that are related to fault tolerance, such as error detection, and error and fault handling. These architectural abstractions and their internal views can be instantiated into concrete components and connectors for designing fault-tolerant software architectures. In a complementary way, the proposed rigorous solution also defines activities which use formal methods and model-based test cases do systematize the verification and validation of the system's behaviour related to error propagation and handling at the architecture level. The verification and validation occur in two complementary phases of the software development, both of them based on architectural scenarios describing error propagation and handling involving architectural elements (components and connectors). First, using the ProB model checker, which combines the use of set-theory (B-Method) and process algebra (CSP), the software architecture is formally verified in order to anticipate the identification of faults related to the system's model. Second, model-based test cases are generated in order to assess the consistency between the verified software architecture and the implementation of the software system. Finally, the proposed solution also defines rules for model transformation from UML diagrams to formal specification in B-Method and CSP. To overcome the gap between the semi-formal specification of UML and the formal models, the UML diagrams are complemented with predefined stereotypes and tags. The feasibility of our approach was evaluated in the context of three case studies: (i) a critical real-time application; (ii) a real banking system; and (iii) a mobile application (AU) | |