Using Diversity to Design and Deploy Fault Tolerant Web Services

Any software component for instance Web services is prone to unexpected failures. To guarantee business process continuity despite these failures, component replication is usually put forward as a solution to make these components fault tolerant. In this paper we illustrate the limitations of replication and suggests diversity as an alternative solution. In the context of Web services diversity stems from the semantic similarity of functionalities of Web services. Building upon this similarity, a diversity group consisting of semantically similar Web services is built and then controlled using different execution models. Each model defines how the Web services in the diversity group collaborate and step in when one of them fails to ensure operation continuity. An architecture showing the use of diversity to design and deploy fault tolerant Web services is presented in this paper.