Archmeds: An Infrastructure for Dependable Service-Oriented Architectures

Service-Oriented Architectures are responsible for mapping relevant business processes to the corresponding services that, together, add value to the final user. Such architectures should meet main dependability requirements – which include high availability and high reliability. The objective of this work is to describe a software infrastructure, called Archmeds, that operates in the communication between a web service's clients and the web service itself, in order to implement fault tolerance techniques that make effective use of redundancy out of undependable existing services. The Archmeds infrastructure was designed to be remotely accessible via web services technology, so that it can be easily reused during the implementation of different web services-based service oriented architectures. The proposed solution was validated using web services-based applications implemented for the BioCORE biodiversity project. The results show that Archmeds is able to mediate requests to web services ensuring fault tolerance of their responses in the presence of failure scenarios.