Section: Research Program

Fault Management and Causal Analysis

Managing faults is a clear and present necessity in networked embedded systems. At the hardware level, modern multicore architectures are manufactured using inherently unreliable technologies  [41], [51]. The evolution of embedded systems towards increasingly distributed architectures highlighted in the introductory section means that dealing with partial failures, as in Web-based distributed systems, becomes an important issue.

In this axis we intend to address the question of how to cope with faults and failures in embedded systems?. We will tackle this question by exploiting reversible programming models and by developing techniques for fault ascription and explanation in component-based systems.

A common theme in this axis is the use and exploitation of causality information. Causality, i.e., the logical dependence of an effect on a cause, has long been studied in disciplines such as philosophy  [61], natural sciences, law  [62], and statistics  [63], but it has only recently emerged as an important focus of research in computer science. The analysis of logical causality has applications in many areas of computer science. For instance, tracking and analyzing logical causality between events in the execution of a concurrent system is required to ensure reversibility  [58], to allow the diagnosis of faults in a complex concurrent system  [54], or to enforce accountability  [57], that is, designing systems in such a way that it can be determined without ambiguity whether a required safety or security property has been violated, and why. More generally, the goal of fault-tolerance can be understood as being to prevent certain causal chains from occurring by designing systems such that each causal chain either has its premises outside of the fault model (e.g., by introducing redundancy  [53]), or is broken (e.g., by limiting fault propagation  [65]).