Architecture-based Exception Handling

Architecture-based development environments are becoming an effective solution towards the construction of robust distributed systems. Through the abstract description of complex software systems configurations in terms of the interconnection of software elements at the interface level, software reuse and evolution get promoted. In addition, as shown by research results from the software architecture domain, it becomes feasible to provide formal notations for the precise description of configuration behavior, together with associated CASE tools for their automated analyses. However, little attention has been paid to software fault tolerance and in particular exception handling in that context, although this is crucial for achieving software robustness. This paper investigates the design and implementation of exception handling support for architecture-based development environments. After a survey of the issues raised by exception handling at the level of software architecture description, we introduce an exception handling facility for architecture-based software systems, addressing the resulting extension to architecture description languages and the mapping to implementation of software architectures embedding exception handling.