Adaptive Immunity for Software: Towards Autonomous Self-healing Systems
This paper addresses the challenge of building robust software systems that can handle unanticipated runtime problems for software developers and users, by proposing a new approach using artificial immune systems.
This paper explores the concept of autonomous self-healing software systems, which can automatically detect, diagnose, and contain unanticipated runtime problems. It proposes using machine learning to learn system models and argues that artificial immune systems (AISs) are well-suited for this task due to their anomaly detection and diagnosis capabilities.
Testing and code reviews are known techniques to improve the quality and robustness of software. Unfortunately, the complexity of modern software systems makes it impossible to anticipate all possible problems that can occur at runtime, which limits what issues can be found using testing and reviews. Thus, it is of interest to consider autonomous self-healing software systems, which can automatically detect, diagnose, and contain unanticipated problems at runtime. Most research in this area has adopted a model-driven approach, where actual behavior is checked against a model specifying the intended behavior, and a controller takes action when the system behaves outside of the specification. However, it is not easy to develop these specifications, nor to keep them up-to-date as the system evolves. We pose that, with the recent advances in machine learning, such models may be learned by observing the system. Moreover, we argue that artificial immune systems (AISs) are particularly well-suited for building self-healing systems, because of their anomaly detection and diagnosis capabilities. We present the state-of-the-art in self-healing systems and in AISs, surveying some of the research directions that have been considered up to now. To help advance the state-of-the-art, we develop a research agenda for building self-healing software systems using AISs, identifying required foundations, and promising research directions.