Cooperative Model-Based Diagnosis of Web Services

Distributed software systems would benefit from autonomous fault management capabilities, but current practice is only based on handling exceptions without attempts at identifying causes for them. This paper is a step toward Web Services with autonomous diagnostic capabilities. It provides a novel context of application for model-based diagnosis, a context which motivates a decentralized approach. We consider complex services, built as a composition of simpler ones, and we associate a diagnoser with each component service, and a global diagnoser with the complex one. %(this in turn will be the local diagnoser when the global service acts %as a service provider for a more complex service). We characterize local diagnosers, based on abstract models of individual services, and we present the coordination protocol adopted by the global diagnoser.