PANACEA Towards a Self-healing Development Framework

Self-healing capabilities allow software systems to overcome problems occurring during testing and run time, and thus improve overall system behavior. The PANACEA framework introduced in this paper provides a design methodology as well as ready-to-use healing elements aimed at enhancing software systems with self-healing capabilities both at design time and at run time. The PANACEA approach is based on inserting self- healing elements into the system at design and coding time, to be used later for healing at testing and run time. Specifically, the Panacea framework is based on inserting annotations into the system code at design and coding time, to later on serve as an interface for runtime monitoring, managing, configuring and healing of the annotated system components. The current embodiment of PANACEA includes several generic components that provide self-healing capabilities suited for a variety of application types. The PANACEA runtime environment automatically activates and invokes these components in order to optimize and heal the application. The PANACEA framework provides an innovative programming model that enables development of advanced self-healing applications. PANACEA introduces a paradigm shift in which software is made self-healing by design. This paradigm shift, however, is graceful since developers are not required to master neither new programming skills, nor languages. As our initial experiments demonstrate, PANACEA introduces a very small performance overhead, and scales well.