Specifying redundancy tactics as crosscutting concerns using aspect-oriented modeling

Abstract

Various redundancy tactics can be modeled at the design stage of safety-critical systems thereby providing a set of fault-tolerance guidelines for subsequent development activities. However, existing approaches usually interweave redundancy tactics into the functional models making them complex and cluttered; the maintenance of such models is time-consuming and error-prone. To address this problem, we provide a modeling approach to separate the redundancy tactics from the base functional models using aspect-oriented modeling. More specifically, the conceptual models of the redundancy tactics and their semantic constraints are first de- fined for deriving the relevant aspects. Subsequently, a UML profile is proposed to specify the tactic aspects followed by mapping these concepts to the corresponding concepts of aspect-oriented modeling based on pre-defined principles. In accordance with our proposed profile, reuse directives are applied to handle the overlap of structural features between redundancy tactics and other kinds of tactic. Based on our tactic aspects and their configured attributes, a weaving algorithm is proposed to associate the tactic aspects with the base functional models. The proposed approach is compared with a traditional tactic modeling approach using two safety-critical systems, revealing that: 1) our approach significantly reduces the number of extra model elements needed in the tactic design stage; 2) our approach can largely avoid the impact of changing of the base functional model as the model evolves.