Reflective Fault-Tolerant Systems: From Experience to Challenges
IEEE Transactions on Computers
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This paper presents the principles of multi-levelreflection as an enabling technology for the design andimplementation of adaptive fault tolerant systems.Byexhibiting the structural and behavioral aspects of asoftware component,the reflection paradigm enables thedesign and implementation of appropriate non-functionalmechanisms at a meta-level.The separation of concernsprovided by reflective architectures makes reflection aperfect match for fault tolerance mechanisms.However,in order to provide the necessary and sufficientinformation for error detection and recovery,reflectionmust be applied to all system layers in an orthogonalmanner.This is the main motivation behind the notion ofmulti-level reflection that is introduced in this paper.Wedescribe the basic concepts of this new architecturalparadigm,and illustrate them with concrete examples.We also discuss some practical work that has recentlybeen carried out to start implementing the proposedframework.