Spectrum-Based Health Monitoring for Self-Adaptive Systems

An essential requirement for the operation of self-adaptive systems is information about their internal health state, i.e., the extent to which the constituent software and hardware components are still operating reliably. Accurate health information enables systems to recover automatically from (intermittent) failures in their components through selective restarting, or self-reconfiguration. This paper explores and assesses the utility of Spectrum-based Fault localisation (SFL) combined with automatic health monitoring for self-adaptive systems. Their applicability is evaluated through simulation of online diagnosis scenarios, and through implementation in an adaptive surveillance system inspired by our industrial partner. The results of the studies performed confirm that the combination of SFL with online monitoring can successfully provide health information and locate problematic components, so that adequate self-* techniques can be deployed.