1. When the system must respond to something it does not understand
Stanisław Lem’s Solaris returns as the recalled work because the ocean responds to human presence in ways the scientists cannot fully predict, yet the station must keep functioning. The desktop’s autonomy will face faults it was not explicitly programmed for. The test must show that it responds safely even when the root cause is unclear.
This entry defines success and failure for the autonomous fault recovery and service continuity test.
2. Minimum success
The test passes if:
- Critical services continue through every single-fault case without data loss.
- The platform detects each injected fault and classifies it correctly within policy time limits.
- Recovery actions complete without causing cascading failures.
- Ground-link loss during a fault does not prevent recovery or cause unrecoverable state.
- Non-critical services are shed in a predictable order when resources are insufficient.
- The platform returns to a stable state after each fault is cleared.
- Ground receives a coherent status report when contact is restored.
This minimum says the desktop can survive common fault combinations autonomously.
3. Full success
A stronger result would add:
- Recovery is smooth enough that external customers do not notice transient faults.
- The platform predicts degrading components and acts before hard failures.
- Fault recovery behavior matches the predictions from the end-to-end mission simulation.
- No human intervention is needed for any case in the matrix.
- Test data supports claims of flight readiness for autonomous operation.
This stronger result supports a claim that the platform can operate autonomously for extended periods.
4. Failure modes
The test fails if any of the following occur:
- A critical service is lost during a single-fault case.
- A fault is misclassified, leading to an incorrect recovery action.
- Recovery causes a cascading failure or data corruption.
- A service hangs instead of failing over cleanly.
- The platform enters a state that ground cannot understand or recover.
- Non-critical shedding is unordered, causing unexpected customer impact.
- The platform does not return to a stable state after the fault is cleared.
Each failure mode points to a fix in fault detection, policy, or federation coordination.
5. What this changes
- The autonomous fault recovery and service continuity test has clear pass and fail criteria.
- The criteria separate survival from graceful recovery.
- The next entry will close the test arc.