Towards the Integration of Fault, Resource, and Power Management

The runtime management of faults, resources and power have been traditionally dissociated in the development of embedded software systems. Each of them copes with unsolicited events of different types (i.e. errors, resource saturation and power alarms), and operates independently of the other two. In this paper we study the case of using alarm events generated by the resource and power management mechanisms to trigger a graceful degradation mechanism that is otherwise used for fault management purposes. The occurrence of an unsolicited event is reported to the graceful degradation mechanism, which removes from the running system those parts necessary to eliminate, or lessen, the source of the event, while at the same time allow the system to deliver the basic functionality for each of the tasks that it runs. As a consequence, the reliability, robustness, and performance qualities of the system under study improved significantly, for a negligible increase in the complexity of the graceful degradation mechanism.

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