Architectural level support for dynamic reconfiguration and fault tolerance in component-based distributed software

This paper presents a novel architectural approach to support fault tolerance in component-based distributed software (CBDS) through dynamic reconfiguration. Using the graph-oriented programming (GOP) model, the software architecture of CBDS is specified by a logical graph which is reified as an explicit object distributed over the network. Dynamic reconfiguration is implemented by executing a set of operations defined over the graph. The approach supports fault tolerance by dynamically reconfiguring the CBDS upon detection of faults. We describe the basic model, the system architecture and its prototype implementation on top of CORBA.