FI4FA: A Formalism for Incompletion, Inconsistency, Interference and Impermanence Failures' Analysis

Abstract

To architect dependable distributed component-based, transactional systems, failures as well as their mitigation behaviors must be analyzed. Analysis helps in planning if, where and which mitigation means are needed to increase quality, by reducing the failures that threaten the system's dependability. Fault Propagation and Transformation Calculus (FPTC) is a technique for automatically calculating the failure behavior of the entire system from the failure behavior of its components [1]. FPTC, however, considers few failure types and offers no support to analyse the mitigation behaviour. To overcome these limitations and support the mitigation's planning, we introduce a new formalism, called FI4FA. FI4FA focuses on failures avoidable through transaction-based mitigations. FI4FA extends FPTC by enabling the analysis of I4 (incompletion, inconsistency, interference and impermanence) failures as well as the analysis of the mitigations, needed to guarantee completion, consistency, isolation and durability. We also illustrate the usage of FI4FA on a set of examples.