Selecting an Optimal Fault Tolerance Strategy for Reliable Service-Oriented Systems with Local and Global Constraints

Abstract

Functionally equivalent web services can be composed to form more reliable service-oriented systems. However, the choice of fault tolerance strategy can have a significant effect on the quality-of-service (QoS) of the resulting service-oriented systems. In this paper, we investigate the problem of selecting an optimal fault tolerance strategy for building reliable service-oriented systems. We formulate the user requirements as local and global constraints and model the selection of fault tolerance strategy as an optimization problem. A heuristic algorithm is proposed to efficiently solve the optimization problem. Fault tolerance strategy selection for semantically related tasks is also investigated in this paper. Large-scale real-world experiments are conducted to illustrate the benefits of the proposed approach. The experimental results show that our problem modeling approach and the proposed selection algorithm make it feasible to manage the fault tolerance of complex service-oriented systems both efficiently and effectively.