THE PROJECT

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Ws-Diamond, Web Services - DIAgnosability, Monitoring and Diagnosis is a project of the Sixth Framework Programme Priority2 - Information Society Technologies. It's a Specific Targeted Research or Innovation Project.

The possibility of creating self-healing software in order to guarantee reliability and availability of software systems and service is one of the main challenges for research The WS-DIAMOND project is a first step towards self-healing software and specifically self-healing Web Services.

A self-healing Web Service is able to monitor itself, to diagnose the causes of a failure and to recover from it, where a failure can be either functional, such as the inability to provide a given service, or non-functional, such as a loss of service quality. Self-healing can be performed at the level of a single service, and at a more global level, with support to identify critical misbehaviour of groups of services and to provide Web Services with reaction mechanism to global level failures. The focus of WS-Diamond is on composite and conversationally complex Web Services, where composite means that a Web Service relies on the integration of various other services, while conversationally complex means that during service provision a Web Service needs to carry out a complex interaction with the consumer application, where several conversational turns are exchanged between them.

In the project we tackled two main issues:

• On-line support: developing an operational framework for self-healing service execution of conversationally complex Web Services, where monitoring, detection and diagnosis of anomalous situations, due to functional or non-functional errors is carried on and repair/reconfiguration is performed, thus guaranteeing reliability and availability of Web Services;
• Off-line analysis: designing a methodology and tools for service design that guarantee effective and efficient diagnosability/repairability during execution;

In order to achieve these goals, we carried on research in different areas such as Semantic Web languages (for describing service properties, i.e., models), service composition techniques (for describing service interaction) as well as model-based reasoning and diagnosis. As regards the latter, in particular, recent results and techniques for diagnosing and repairing (or recovering from failures) complex physical devices, and for designing easily diagnosable and reliable devices, are being adapted/modified in order to be applied to Web Services networks.

Results

Here is a short summary of the project results. More details can be found in the status section.

1. Platform for supporting self healing execution. A runtime platform that can be used to test, run, and repair BPEL processes.
2. Decentralized Diagnostic algorithm. Carries out model-based diagnosis of a system in a distributed context.
3. Decentralized chronicle-based diagnostic algorithm. A tool dedicated to monitoring and diagnosing distributed systems.
4. QoS analysis tool. Monitors the quality of a given service according to a selected set of parameters.
5. Repair planner. Explores possible strategies/plans for successfully completing a faulty workflow instances.
6. Diagnosability analysis. Two original algorithms that perform a complete automated diagnosability analysis.
7. Analysis and Design methodology. Provides guidelines for designing services in such a way that they can be easily recovered during execution.
8. Repairability Analysis algorithm. Supports workflow designers by allowing them to check the repairability of workflow processes and to • to asses relative impact of non-repairable activities.
9. Temporal Conformance. Checks if a web service composition including a set of choreographies and orchestrations is temporally consistent.
10. Model Compiler and Diagnostic Knowledge Base Generator. Takes as input a BPEL 2.0 service package describing an orchestration of Web services, and produces as output a Petri net model representing both control and data flow.