Towards a Self-Healing approach to sustain Web Services Reliability.

International audienceWeb service technology expands the role of the Web from a simple data carrier to a service provider. To sustain this role, some issues such as reliability continue to hurdle Web services widespread use, and thus need to be addressed. Autonomic computing seems offering solutions to the specific issue of reliability. These solutions let Web services self-heal in response to the errors that are detected and then fixed. Self-healing is simply defined as the capacity of a system to restore itself to a normal state without human intervention. In this paper, we design and implement a selfhealing approach to achieve Web services reliability. Two steps are identified in this approach: (1) model a Web service using two behaviors known as operational and control; and (2) monitor the execution of a Web service using a control interface that sits between these two behaviors. This control interface is implemented in compliance with the principles of aspect-oriented programming and case-based reasoning

Flexible provisioning of Web service workflows

Web services promise to revolutionise the way computational resources and business processes are offered and invoked in open, distributed systems, such as the Internet. These services are described using machine-readable meta-data, which enables consumer applications to automatically discover and provision suitable services for their workflows at run-time. However, current approaches have typically assumed service descriptions are accurate and deterministic, and so have neglected to account for the fact that services in these open systems are inherently unreliable and uncertain. Specifically, network failures, software bugs and competition for services may regularly lead to execution delays or even service failures. To address this problem, the process of provisioning services needs to be performed in a more flexible manner than has so far been considered, in order to proactively deal with failures and to recover workflows that have partially failed. To this end, we devise and present a heuristic strategy that varies the provisioning of services according to their predicted performance. Using simulation, we then benchmark our algorithm and show that it leads to a 700% improvement in average utility, while successfully completing up to eight times as many workflows as approaches that do not consider service failures