Providing support for specifying redundancy tactics using aspect-oriented modeling

Modelers want to model redundancy tactics in the design phase so as to provide fault-tolerance guidelines for the following development process. However, existing approaches usually interweave redundancy tactics into the functional models and result in complex and cluttered models, which are difficult and time-consuming to be maintained. To address this problem, we provide a modeling approach to separate redundancy tactics from the base functional models using aspect-oriented modeling. First of all, the conceptual models of redundancy tactics and their semantic constraints are provided for deriving the tactic aspects. After mapping the tactic concepts into the concepts of aspect-oriented modeling, UML profiles for specifying the tactic aspects are proposed. Based on our tactic aspects and their configured attributes, we provide a weaving algorithm to associate the tactic aspects with the base functional models. Finally, we compare our work with an existing tactic modeling approach through an avionics system model. The results show that our work can help modelers to reduce the modeling effort of components and dependencies significantly during the modeling process of redundancy tactics.