We designed our system components with five states: Off, Standby, Disabled, Enabled, Fault. (We didn't base this off a standard, but we did have some examples.)
A given component may have one or more subcomponents. A subcomponent never cares about the state of a supercomponent, but a component may care about the state of a subcomponent. We are actively debating how much so, though. In particular, if one of component A's subcomponents is in FaultState, does that mean that A is also in FaultState? We have to date answered that question one way but now we are having second thoughts.
I have searched without any real success the last couple days for a great paper, book, example, or standard that will help here, but I haven't found much. Maybe I don't know the right keywords. Does anyone here know of a good reference?
