Self-Healing Approach in the FastFix Project

The EU FP7 FastFIX project tackles issues related to remote software maintenance. In order to achieve this, the project considers approaches relying on context elicitation, event correlation, fault-replication and self-healing. Self-healing helps systems return to a normal state after the occurrence of a fault or vulnerability exploitation has been detected. The problem is intuitively appealing as a way to automate the different maintenance type processes (corrective, adaptive and perfective) and forms an interesting area of research that has inspired many research initiatives. In this paper, we propose a framework for automating corrective maintenance and present its early stage development, based on software control principles. Our approach automates the engineering of self-healing systems as it does not require the system to be designed in a specific way. Instead it can be applied to legacy systems and automatically equips them with observation and control points. Moreover, the proposed approach relies on a sound control theory developed for Discrete Event Systems. Finally, this paper contributes to the field by introducing challenges for effective application of this approach to relevant industrial systems.