Most fault-tolerant application programs cannot cope with constant changes in their environments and user requirements because they embed policies and mechanisms together so that if the policies or mechanisms are changed the whole programs have to be changed as well. This paper presents a reactive system approach to overcoming this limitation. The reactive system concepts are an attractive paradigm for system design, development and maintenance because they separate policies from mechanisms. In the paper we propose a generic reactive system architecture and use group communication primitives to model it. We then implement it as a generic package which can be applied in any distributed applications. The system performance shows that it can be used in a distributed environment effectively. © 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.