The Self-Measurement Principle: A Design Principle for Large-scale, Long-lived, and Highly Reliable Concurrent Systems

A good design, development, and maintenance methodology for concurrent systems must be based on a good recognition and/or understanding of the intrinsic characteristics of concurrent systems. Measuring and monitoring the behavior of a complex concurrent system is an indispensable way to achieve the reliability of the system. Based on recognition and/or understanding of the wholeness principle of concurrent systems and the uncertainty principle in measuring and monitoring concurrent systems, this paper proposes a new design principle, named the “self-measurement principle,” for large-scale, long-lived, and highly reliable concurrent systems. The self-measurement principle requires that a large-scale, long-lived, and highly reliable concurrent system should be constructed by some function components and some (maybe only one) permanent selfmeasurement components that act concurrently with the function components, measure and monitor the system itself according to some requirements, and pass run-time information about the system’s behavior to the outside world of the system.