How to Prevent Failure of the Healing Mechanism in Self-Healing Systems

Self-healing systems tackle the issue of ever increasing complexity of software and its management. Selfhealing systems provide solutions for the software systems to manage themselves and recover from errors. There are multiple approaches to self-healing systems ranging from agent based solutions to frameworks. The self-healing process is usually enclosed into a separate layer or components in the system. The separate layer does system diagnosis and repair actions on the system. This layer can fail just as the application layer. In this paper I take a look into the problem of self healing layer failures. I will present two systems and discuss their differences and weak points. There is a couple of possibilities to improve the reliability of the healing layer. These are computational verification and common fault tolerance techniques. To minimise the possibility of failures on self-healing systems, either of these techniques can be used.