The design of a self-healing composition cycle for Web services

The Web service paradigm allows applications to interact electronically with one another over the Internet. Standards and languages, such as BPEL and OWL-S provide a platform with which Web services can be integrated. Moreover, various AI planning techniques have also been adapted to integrate services. However, the autonomous and distributed nature of an integrated service presents unique challenges to the reliability of the composed Web services. Resilience of the process execution can be achieved through self-healing, that is, the capability to detect failures autonomously and to recover from them. This paper presents the design of a self-healing composition cycle for Web services that can be used to evaluate self-healing techniques in Web service composition. Having a full understanding of the interaction between different modules in a self-healing cycle provides the designer of a composition with the knowledge necessary to build more effective self-healing systems with minimum runtime overhead.