Self-Healing Systems: Foundations and Challenges

The term and characteristic of self-healing, applied to systems, is often seen from different fields of computer science, such as fault tolerance or network and service management, with diverging semantics. Since this impression was confirmed also during the first discussions of the Dagstuhl seminar on "Self-Healing and Self-Adaptive Systems", a seminar's working group on "Terminology" was formed with the objective to address the question of finding commonalities and differences 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 identification of the main challenges of such self-healing systems are presented.