Failure notifications: a useful extension to the object programming model

Object oriented system design and development methods have proven useful in building large and complex systems. Since real time, dependable systems tend to be large and complex systems it is natural to use object oriented methods for building such systems. Unfortunately, the object oriented programming paradigm and the languages that support it were not designed with real time or fault tolerant system in mind. It is therefore important to look at ways in which the object model can be extended to simplify the construction of real time, fault tolerant systems. The paper proposes extending the object model to include failure notifications. A case is made for the need for such failure notifications and the advantages of having such notifications.