Dynamic system reconfiguration via service composition for dependable computing

Dependable service-oriented computing is challenging because it faces an open, heterogeneous, and dynamic computing environment. In a service-oriented computing system, services developed by different vendors on different platforms and in different programming languages perform computations collaboratively through open standard protocols. This paper presents an innovative dynamic reconfiguration technology that can be embedded into a service-oriented application to make the application reconfigurable. Traditional reconfiguration algorithm assumes each component can independently switch without collaboration. The proposed reconfiguration agents are embedded in different services, and they communicate via a collaborative reconfiguration protocol to achieve a consistent reconfiguration decision. In addition, the reconfiguration protocol itself is fault-tolerant.