An Approach for Diagnosing Unexpected Faults in Web Service Flows

Potential faults have greatly reduced the dependability of business processes, so fault diagnosis is becoming an important issue which aims at supporting self-healing service flow execution. The existing fault handling mechanism provided by BPEL can only identify the faults which have been pre-defined in standards or by users. However, unexpected faults are also the main cause of failures in service flow execution. Therefore an effective diagnosis approach is needed to solve this problem. In this paper, we propose a logic-based approach for diagnosing unexpected faults in Web service flows. This approach uses dynamic description logic (DDL) to model business processes, and diagnoses faults based on DDL reasoning. We provide the DDL-based diagnosing algorithm, which takes process description and runtime information as inputs, and returns the related information of possible faults as the result. Moreover, to improve the efficiency of online diagnosis, the incremental DDL-based diagnosing algorithm is presented. Experimental results on a demo system show the effectiveness of this approach.