Towards an Error Modeling Framework for Dependable Component-based Systems∗†

Component-Based Development (CBD) of software, with its successes in enterprise computing, has the promise of being a good development model due to its cost effectiveness and potential for achieving high quality of components by virtue of reuse. However, for systems with dependability concerns, such as real-time systems, the major challenge in using CBD will be predicting dependability attributes, or providing dependability assertions, based on the individual component properties and architectural aspects. In this paper, we propose a framework which aims to address this challenge. Specifically, we describe a revised error classification, error propagation aspects and briefly sketch how to compose error models within the context of ComponentBased Systems (CBS). The ultimate goal is to perform the analysis on a given CBS, in order to find bottlenecks in achieving dependability requirements and to provide guidelines on the usage of appropriate error detection and fault tolerance mechanisms.