Self-Healing Systems: Foundations and Challenges

The term and characteristic of self-healing, applied to sys- tems, is often seen from dierent elds of computer science, such as fault tolerance or network and service management, with diverging semantics. Since this impression was conrmed also during the rst discussions of the Dagstuhl seminar on "Self-Healing and Self-Adaptive Systems", a seminar's working group on "Terminology" was formed with the objec- tive to address the question of nding commonalities and dierences in a self-healing characteristic of stand-alone and distributed systems. The outcomes of the discussion in terms of foundations, the description of the self-healing process and the identication of the main challenges of such self-healing systems are presented.