SHADOWS: Self-healing complex software systems

Abstract

As software systems grow in size and complexity, their vulnerability to faults increases, and their reliability and manageability deteriorate. Software assurance methods which aim to alleviate this problem do not scale well. Careful design can also help eliminating faults, yet some are never addressed at design time. Software self-healing is an emerging approach to tackling this problem. Self-healing solutions presented to date commonly solve a single class of problems, or they are not applicable in production environments. The SHADOWS project focuses on self-healing of complex industrial systems. It introduces innovative technologies to enable self-healing of classes of problems not solved elsewhere. It integrates these technologies into a common solution. It further validates the solution in industrial environments. Initial results of this evaluation indicate clear advantages of SHADOWS self-healing technologies.