Repairability

A system is regarded as being repairable if it allows defect correction with limited effort. Repairability, itself, can be further broken down into a further set of properties:

• Diagnostic ability – identifying the defect
• Accessibility – how easy it is to access the defected part of the system.
• New component availability – whether replacement components for repairing the defect exist or are easy to obtain
• Re-start ability – how easy it is to restart the system once a repair is made

How a system is designed and implemented can greatly enhance the repairability of a system. In particular, modular and abstract designs can assist repairs by allowing fault-prone components to be easily replaced in the event of a failure.

Repairability draws on both fault tolerance and maintainability properties. A repairable system needs to be able to detect faults within the system and then perform corrective maintenance in order to repair them. Repairability and system reliability are also strongly linked, with the need for repairability decreasing as a system’s reliability increases.

As P2P systems are distributed in nature the main difficultly when considering repairability is how to identify and repair defects that can occur throughout the network. This is especially the case for decentralised architectures.