An approach to detecting failures automatically

ABSTRACT

Failure detection is a difficult and often expensive task. The principle of self-healing addresses this cost issue, but poses new research questions. This work focuses on detecting non-trivial failures that are hard to specify and difficult to detect within the context of self-healing software. Typical failures in this class would be problems arising at the component integration level. In this paper we discuss general requirements for failure detection in self-healing software, propose an approach to automatically map system level specifications to run-time checkable code-level assertions, and illustrate our technique through an example.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications

Additional Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.4 Software/Program Verification
          Subjects: Programming by contract

General Terms:
Design, Reliability

Keywords:
failure detection, model driven engineering, self-healing