Towards Adaptive Fault Tolerance in Embedded Systems

Dynamic systems become more and more widespread in many application fields. This observation highlights the trend that systems are no more considered as running in a static, predefined environment. Evolution has to be taken into account and fault tolerance does not make an exception. When the executive or environmental context has changed, hypothesis or fault model may become outdated or invalid. On-line adaptation of fault tolerance has to be tackled. This paper deals with the design of fault tolerance for its on-line adaptation. It describes a reflective architecture, suitable for modifying fault tolerance at runtime. Then it shows how fault tolerance may be componentized into small components to enable its runtime modification.