SHIWS: A self-healing integrator for web services

The integration of third-party web services is challenged by the difficulty of keeping consistency between software systems that are maintained by different organizations and may evolve dynamically and independently, because of both changes in service implementation and dynamic discovery of new services. In principle, services that comply with the same contract should be equivalent, but in practice contracts leave many semantic details unspecified and implementationdependent. High availability requirements and dynamically discovered web services exclude the possibility of traditional stopupdate- test-redeploy-restart approaches to the integration of new or modified services. Self-adaptive applications have been recognized as viable solutions for dealing with systems where size and complexity increase beyond the ability of humans to respond manually, coherently and timely to environmental and system changes. In this paper, we propose a tool supported solution that exploits a self-adaptive approach, based on a mechanism for revealing possible runtime mismatches between requested and provided services, and for dynamically adapting the client application accordingly.