International projects
Dependable Distributed Systems
Organisations (2)
Abstract
Distributed software systems are a dominant factor for sustainable economic growth of the European Union, serving as a basis for innovative applications. Especially SMEs will identify successful business cases by focusing on specialised know-how in the global market of software components, services and infrastructures. The key element for achieving scalable and maintainable distributed software systems is dependability, because otherwise the complexity of distribution would leave the system uncontrollable.Our proposal aims at a concept for optimizing dependability in distributed component-based software systems and comprises an architecture, rules for technology integration, open platform services, well-defined metrics and evaluation methods, and necessary prototype implementations. By promoting the idea of open systems, we do not aim at a new middleware, but rather at the integration with existing component infrastructures and commercial off the shelf products. Furthermore, DeDiSys is not a method for testing and verification, but rather a highly innovative method to deal with failures of nodes and links.Technically, dependability is an aspect of every part of the system. Similar to other approaches we use replication as means to provide transparent fault-tolerance and persistence, but we are especially focused on the trade-off between availability and consistency by using a mixture of asynchronous and synchronous replication techniques. This trade-off can be measured and configured to allow an application-specific optimum of availability. As there is currently only little research in this area, the results of DeDiSys would clearly go beyond the state of the art.Future exploitation of DeDiSys will include safety critical applications for air traffic control and public safety, reliability for wireless and ubiquitous computing, enhanced security due to improved availability of inherently distributed security databases, and component certification.
