A knowledge-based approach for self-healing service-oriented applications

In the context of service-oriented applications, the self-healing property provides reliable execution in order to support failures and assist automatic recovery techniques. This paper presents a knowledge-based approach for self-healing Composite Service (CS) applications. A CS is an application composed by a set of services interacting each other and invoked on the Web. Our approach is supported by Service Agents, which are in charge of the CS fault-tolerance execution control, making decisions about the selection of recovery and proactive strategies. Service Agents decisions are based on the information they have about the whole application, about themselves, and about what it is expected and what it is really happening at run-time. Hence, application knowledge for decision making comprises off-line precomputed global and local information, user QoS preferences, and propagated actual run-time information. Our approach is evaluated experimentally using a case study.