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Rigorous Development of Complex Fault-Tolerant Systems pp 80–99Cite as

Reasoning About Exception Flow at the Architectural Level

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNPSE,volume 4157))

Abstract

An important challenge faced by the developers of fault- tolerant systems is to build reliable fault tolerance mechanisms. To achieve the desired levels of reliability, mechanisms for detecting and handling errors should be designed since early phases of software development, preferably using a rigorous or formal methodology. In recent years, many researchers have been advocating the idea that exception handling-related issues should be addressed at the architectural level, as a complement to implementation-level exception handling. However, few works in the literature have addressed the problem of describing how exceptions flow amongst architectural elements. This work proposes a solution to this problem to support the early detection of mismatches between architectural elements due to exceptions. Moreover, it makes it possible to validate whether the architecture satisfies some properties of interest regarding exception flow before the system is actually built. Our solution proposes a model for describing the architectural flow of exceptions which is precise and automatically analyzable by means of a tool.

The authors are partially supported by FINEP/Brazil (1843/04), project CompGov, which aims at developing a Shared Library of Components for e-Government.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Computação, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Caixa Postal 6176, CEP 13083-970, Campinas, SP

    Fernando Castor Filho, Patrick Henrique da S. Brito & Cecília Mary F. Rubira

Authors
  1. Fernando Castor Filho
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  2. Patrick Henrique da S. Brito
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  3. Cecília Mary F. Rubira
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southampton, United Kingdom

    Michael Butler

  2. School of Computing Science, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

    Cliff B. Jones

  3. Computer Science School, Newcastle University, UK

    Alexander Romanovsky

  4. Åbo Akademi University, Finland

    Elena Troubitsyna

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© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Filho, F.C., da S. Brito, P.H., Rubira, C.M.F. (2006). Reasoning About Exception Flow at the Architectural Level. In: Butler, M., Jones, C.B., Romanovsky, A., Troubitsyna, E. (eds) Rigorous Development of Complex Fault-Tolerant Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4157. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11916246_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11916246_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-48265-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-48267-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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