A UML Profile for Automatic Code Generation of Optimistic Graceful Degradation Features at the Application Level

Safety standards such as ISO26262 or IEC61508 recommend a variety of safety mechanisms for the development of safety-critical systems. One of these mechanisms is graceful degradation, which aims to provide a degraded service of an application after an error has occurred. While several safety standards recommend graceful degradation, they do not provide any concrete development or implementation assistance. This paper employs model-driven development to realize such an automated approach for optimistic graceful degradation, which is a specific variant of the graceful degradation safety mechanism. We introduce a UML profile that may be used to model optimistic graceful degradation at the application level within a UML class diagram. We leverage this model representation to automatically generate productive source code that is capable of optimistic graceful degradation. This source code is generated without requiring any additional developer actions.