Self-management of external device failures in embedded software systems

This thesis describes an approach to establishing a framework for detecting failures in the external devices of the embedded systems and self-managing the detected failures. To do this, this thesis develops the detection framework based on the external device types in embedded systems. Each device type is categorized in terms of device characteristics such as input/output, periodic/non-periodic, asynchronous, or active/passive. There are unique communication patterns between the systems and their external devices. These patterns are used to devise failure or fault detection mechanisms. Further, the self-managing framework is developed for handling external device failures from the software perspectives. The self-management is three fold framework - self-healing, self-configuration or adaptation, and self-reporting. The self-healing tries to re-initialize the device and its related attributes to resuscitate the failed devices. The self-configuration adapts the failed device against tolerable failures of devices. The self-reporting reports the intolerable system halting failures to the concerned authorities for further action. The proposed approach in this thesis has been applied to use cases in the elevator system, cruise control system and microwave system.