A Method to Manage Faults in SOA using Autonomic Computing

In Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), service providers develop and deploy reusable services on the repositories, and service consumers utilize blackbox form of services through their interfaces. Services are also highly evolvable and often heterogeneous. Due to these characteristics of the service, it is hard to manage the faults if faults occur on the services. Autonomic Computing (AC) is a way of designing systems which can manage themselves without direct human intervention. Applying the key disciplines of AC to service management is appealing since key technical issues for service management can be effectively resolved by AC. In this paper, we present a theoretical model, Symptom-Cause-Actuator (SCA), to enable autonomous service fault management in SOA. We derive SCA model from our rigorous observation on how physicians treat patients. In this paper, we first define a five-phase computing model and meta-model of SCA. And, we define a schema of SCA profile, which contains instances of symptoms, causes, actuators and their dependency values in a machine readable form. Then, we present detailed algorithms for the five phases that are used to manage faults the services. To show the applicability of our approach, we demonstrate the result of our case study for the domain of 'Flight Ticket Management Services'.