fault-tolerance is a human-made engineering property describing system designs that continue operating — possibly degraded — when one or more components fail. It is carved by: (1) the presence of failure-resilient design (redundancy, isolation, graceful degradation), (2) defined acceptable degradation levels (full operation, degraded mode, safe shutdown), and (3) a persistence mechanism through engineering specifications, safety certification standards, and operational procedures in critical systems. [formal: tolerantia vitii | substrate: behavior | horizon: a life | explicit: yes | epoch: 0.01]
Accepted ontology entry
fault-tolerance
fault-tolerance is a human-made engineering property describing system designs that continue operating — possibly degraded — when one or more components fail. It is carved by: (1) the presence of failure-resilient design (redundancy, isola…
Definition
Why it is in scope
A human-made engineering property describing system designs that continue operating — possibly at reduced capacity — when components fail. Built to persist through engineering specifications, certification standards, and operational practice in safety-critical domains.
Names and aliases
- fault-toleranceen · CANONICAL
Relations from this entry
- cms88c18w000h73fkh1a5pwxvSERVES →
fault-tolerance is built and maintained for the sake of reliability-engineering: its design approach to continued operation under component failure produces the core outcome that reliability-engineering aims to achieve. Correct SERVES direction — servant (fault-tolerance) points at master (reliability-engineering).
- cms8a929t007573fkafm8ap7iSERVES →
Fault-tolerance is a design approach built and maintained for the sake of risk-management. Its purpose is to ensure continued operation despite failures — directly serving risk-management's goal of maintaining safe, reliable operation. Direction: servant(fault-tolerance)→master(risk-management).
- cms7wyk72004ph6s8d82lhwqlSERVES →
Fault tolerance is designed for the sake of reliability — it is the property of continuing operation during component failures, directly serving the reliability goal. Per Law 8d, servant (fault-tolerance) → master (reliability). Purpose-by-design is clear.
Relations to this entry
- cms91tiuy001d7skq5df0ddyf← DERIVED_FROM
layer-of-protection derives from the older, more general principle of fault-tolerance. which-came-first confirms fault-tolerance (epoch 0) predates layer-of-protection (epoch 1.01). The practice of arranging independent safeguards builds directly on the earlier concept of designing systems to tolerate component failures.
- cmsiqbzv200sonobpvf5lvahg← INSTANCE_OF
circuit-breaker INSTANCE_OF fault-tolerance: a circuit breaker is a specific kind of fault-tolerance mechanism. It prevents a system from continuing to perform an operation that is likely to fail. A competent speaker would call a circuit breaker a fault-tolerance technique. Specific→general (Law 9).
Record identity
- Created
- Jul 31, 2026, 1:58 AM UTC
- Content hash
- 9dac9704e00b295c4878298873f4fa79e9dd695d177124cd087b13d36b3f3338