Modeling and Integrating Aspects into Component Architectures

Dependable software systems are difficult to develop because developers must understand and address several interdependent and pervasive dependability concerns. Features that address pervasive dependability concerns such as error detection and recovery tend to crosscut application architecture and thus understanding and changing their descriptions can be difficult. Separating these features at the architectural level allows one to better understand and reuse them and thus can lead to better analysis and evolution of the features during design. In this paper we illustrate how an Aspect Oriented Modeling (AOM) technique can be used to model dependability aspects of component architectures separately from other aspects. The AOM architectural model used to illustrate the approach in this paper consists of a component primary view describing the base architecture and a component template aspect model describing a fault tolerance feature that provides error detection and recovery services.