On Self-Stabilizing Systems: An Approach to the Specication and Design of Fault Tolerant Systems

A self-stabilizing system is one which can recover from transient faults in a nite number of steps. We present a theory for determining if a behavior specication can be satised with a self-stabilizing system and if not, then what the largest self-stabilizing subset and smallest self-stabilizing superset of the specication is. The eects of self-stabilizing behavior on the control of discrete event systems is also investigated