Modeling Web Services for Diagnosis

As a step towards the development of self-healing Web Services, we present an approach to modeling Web Services for diagnosis derived from the Model-Based Reasoning approach, which has been developed in the Artificial Intelligence community for reasoning about physical system. The approach is based on a qualitative modeling abstraction of the underlying system, which is intended to be derivable from the design of the system in terms of its components. We show how a similar goal can be pursued for Web Services, illustrating how the typical control-flow patterns identified in the literature of workflow modelling can be represented in a model suitable for the application of Model-Based Diagnosis to related observed problems (data errors and erroneous activations of workflow paths) to their possible causes.