FastFIX: An approach to self-healing

The EU FP7 FastFIX project tackles issues related to remote software maintenance. In order to achieve this, the project considers approaches relying on context elicitation, event correlation, fault-replication and self-healing. Self-healing helps systems return to a normal state after the occurrence of a fault or vulnerability exploitation has been detected. The problem is intuitively appealing as a way to automate the different maintenance type processes (corrective, adaptive and perfective) and forms an interesting area of research that has inspired many research initiatives. In this paper, we propose a framework for automating corrective maintenance and present its early stage development, based on software control principles. Our approach automates the engineering of self-healing systems as it does not require the system to be designed in a specific way. Instead it can be applied to legacy systems and automatically equips them with observation and control points. Moreover, the proposed approach relies on a sound control theory developed for Discrete Event Systems. Finally, this paper contributes to the field by introducing challenges for effective application of this approach to relevant industrial systems.