Self-healing Information Systems

Abstract

Information systems in highly dynamic collaborative environments are based on the composition of services and processes from different organizations and systems. In most cases, such an environment is not under the control of a single organization and therefore requires a particular attention to its management to ensure correct functionalities. Different types of faults can occur in the system, both at the functional level and in terms of reduced quality of service. Such faults may cause failures in one or more participating processes, which are hindering the correct completion of business processes towards their required goals. In the presentation, the management of cooperating processes will be discusses, following the approach being proposed within the WS-DIAMOND European project: management of failures is driven by the diagnosis of causes that are leading to the failures, and repair actions are performed on processes and services coordinating repair actions on services. Such an approach allows an autonomic behavior of information systems, reducing the need of design efforts to anticipate possible combinations of predicted exceptions. Business process management is based on the SH-BPEL (Self-healing Business Process Language) approach proposed at Politecnico di Milano to manage and repair business processes in a flexible service-oriented framework.