Towards mediation-based self-healing of data-driven business processes

This paper describes a novel software engineering approach for designing self-healing systems to manage business processes with particular focus on the recovery from faults caused by uncertainty and semantic failures of data. By the employment of service-oriented software engineering methods, mediation, service discovery, and late binding, we externalize and decentralize autonomic managers, thereby providing support for autonomic orchestration of services and hence autonomic adaptation of the business process in the response to failures. The complexity of the resulting self-healing business process manager is reduced as the system is decomposed into a large number of small and thus easy to maintain components, each implementing a very simple behavior. Similar to systems occurring in nature, the dynamic, composition of these small components spontaneously leads to sophisticated healing capabilities.