Dependability Metadata Acquisition and Assessment: A State of the Art Survey
Claremont Tower · 2010
We define resilience as the ability of a system to maintain dependability while assimilating change, without loss of functionality. To achieve some required level of resilience requires the availability at run-time of dependability explicit metadata, information about system components which can govern decision-making about dynamic reconfiguration. This report reviews the state of the art in research on dependability explicit computing and establishes categories of metadata which can be distinguished. This is achieved by a survey of techniques for gathering and evaluating metadata, and modelling techniques for deriving the dependability characteristics of a system built from components with known properties. From this survey we derive classifications for metadata such as quantitative/qualitative, internal/external and controllable/uncontrollable, and assemble a list of metadata extracted from the literature.