In the paper "Local Reconfiguration Policies" [3], a system was viewed as a collection of components configured to provide a set of user services. Electronic mail, for example, in a local area network, requires a workstation, the cable and associated interface devices, a gateway to the internet service, and so on. Components are not simply hardware devices, but functional combinations of hardware and software.
To study fault tolerance and reconfiguration, we focussed attention on the fact that different sets of components can support the same service. Then, if some components fail, they can be replaced by others in a different configuration. Reconfiguration to restore services as a result of component failure was viewed as a kind of "flow" analogous to information flow. We applied Meadows' theorem on datset aggregates [2] to characterize the maximum safe flow policy.