Towards the generation of AMF configurations from use case maps based availability requirements

Dependability aspects, such as availability and security, are critical in the design and implementation of distributed real-time systems. As a result, it is becoming crucial to model and analyze dependability requirements at the early stages of system development life-cycle. The Service Availability Forum (SA Forum) has developed a set of standard API specifications to standardize high-availability platforms. Among these specifications, the Availability Management Framework (AMF) is the service responsible for managing the availability of the application services by handling application redundant components, dynamically shifting a workload of a faulty component to a healthy component. To manage service availability, AMF requires a configuration of the application it manages. This configuration consists of a logical view of the organization of the application's services and components. Recognizing the need to plan for availability aspects at the early stages of system development life-cycle, this paper proposes an approach to map high level availability requirements into AMF configurations. The early availability requirements are expressed in terms of the Use Case Maps (UCM) language, part of the ITU-T User Requirements Notation (URN) standard. Our approach allows for the early reasoning about availability aspects and promotes the portability and the reusability of the developed systems across different platforms.