On rigorous design and implementation of fault tolerant ambient systems

Developing fault tolerant ambient systems requires many challenging factors to be considered due to the nature of such systems, which tend to contain a lot of mobile elements that change their behaviour depending on the surrounding environment, as well as the possibility of their disconnection and re-connection. It is therefore necessary to construct the critical parts of fault tolerant ambient systems in a rigorous manner. This can be achieved by deploying formal approach at the design stage, coupled with sound framework and support at the implementation stage. In this paper, we briefly describe a middleware that we developed to provide system structuring through the concepts of roles, agents, locations and scopes, making it easier for the developers to achieve fault tolerance. We then outline our experience in developing an ambient lecture system using the combination of formal approach and our middleware.