Creating self-healing service compositions with feature models and microrebooting

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.