Title: Creating self-healing service compositions with feature models and microrebooting

Authors: Jules White, Harrison D. Strowd, Douglas C. Schmidt

Addresses: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA. ' Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN, USA

Abstract: Service-oriented architectures (SOAs) provide loose coupling and software reuse in enterprise applications. SOAs enable applications to heal themselves by failing over to alternate services when a critical application component or service reference fails. The numerous intricate details of identifying errors and planning a recovery strategy make it hard to develop applications that can heal by swapping services. Model-driven engineering (MDE) offers a potential solution to handling the complexity of building applications that can heal by swapping services. This paper presents an MDE technique called Refresh that is based on microrebooting and uses 1) feature models to derive a new and correct service composition when a failure occurs, 2) an application|s component container to shutdown the reference to the failed service, 3) the application container to reboot the subsystem. We also present the results from a case study that shows Refresh significantly reduces both modelling and healing implementation effort.

Keywords: feature modelling; service healing; reconfiguration; constraint satisfaction; service oriented architecture; SOA; autonomic systems; enterprise Java Beans; model-driven engineering; microrebooting; self-healing; service composition; subsystem rebooting.

DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2009.026984

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management, 2009 Vol.4 No.1, pp.35 - 46

Published online: 12 Jul 2009 *

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