IDEA: Improving Dependability for Self-Adaptive Applications

Self-adaptive applications are becoming popular since they are able to adapt their behavior based on changes of environ-ments. However, possible faults in these applications may result in runtime failures, which reduce their dependabili-ty. We propose a novel approach to improving the depend-ability of self-adaptive applications. The approach uses a rematching process to make self-adaptive applications con-sistent with their environments. In the rematching process, consistency failures are automatically detected and fixed at runtime to reduce application failures. The strategy for fix-ing consistency failures includes backward rematching and forward rematching. Proper strategies can be selected ac-cording to rematching ability analysis results for concerned applications. As a result, applications can thus achieve con-sistency with their environments and failures can be signif-icantly avoided. We developed a tool named IDEA to sup-port this process and the experimental results confirmed the effectiveness of our IDEA