UML profile for fault tolerance patterns for service-based systems

Abstract

Service-based systems consist of software units called services which provide software functionalities over the Internet to other parts of the systems. The systems may experience failure due to problems associated with the services such as communication problems and faults within the services themselves. In this paper, we emphasize the importance of fault tolerance mindset during the design of service-based systems and propose a UML profile for fault tolerance patterns which can be used to build a design model for any fault tolerant service-based system. The profile covers fault tolerance patterns at the architecture level and the patterns for error detection and recovery. We present how to use the UML profile to design a fault tolerant version of the supply chain management application, a sample application of the Web Services Interoperability Organization. The paper also reports the impact of fault tolerance design on a number of service quality attributes of this case study application.