Biologically Inspired Self-Healing Software System Architecture

Self-healing capabilities have begun to emerge as an interesting and potentially valuable
property of software systems. Self-healing characteristic enables software systems to
continuously and dynamically monitor, diagnose, and adapt itself after a failures has
occur in their components. Adding such characteristic into existing software systems is
immensely useful and valuable for allowing them to recover from failures. However,
developing such self-healing software systems is a significant challenge.
The nature introduces to us unforeseen concepts in terms of presenting biological
systems that have the ability to handle its abnormal conditions. Based on this observation,
this thesis presents self-healing architecture for software system based on one of the
biological processes that have the ability to heal by itself (the wound-healing process).
The self-healing architecture provides software systems the ability to handle anomalous
conditions that appear among its components. The presented architecture is divided into
to layers, functional and healing layer. In the functional layer, the components of the
system provide its services without any disruptions. The component is considered as
faulty component if it fails to provide its services. The healing layer aims to heal the
faulty component and return it to the running system without the awareness of the user.
The presented self-healing software system is formally described to prove its
functionality. Set-theoretic and Finite State Machine (FSM) is introduced. A prototype
for the presented architecture has been implemented using Java language. Java objects
are considered as the system components. The modules of the healing layer in the selfhealing
architecture have been implemented into Java classes. An object from the module
class will be created to perform its task for the healing process. The thesis concludes with
recommendations for future works in this area and enhancement of the presented
architecture.
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