A planning based approach to failure recovery in distributed systems

Abstract

Failure recovery in distributed systems poses a difficult challenge because of the requirement for high availability. Failure scenarios are usually unpredictable so they can not easily be foreseen. In this research we propose a planning based approach to failure recovery. This approach automates failure recovery by capturing the state after failure, defining an acceptable recovered state as a goal and applying planning to get from the initial state to the goal state. By using planning, this approach can recover from a variety of failed states and reach any of several acceptable states: from minimal functionality to complete recovery.