Transformation of Existing Programs into Autonomic and Self-healing Entities

Autonomic computing is a grand challenge in computing, which aims to produce software that has the properties of self-configuration, self-healing, self-optimization and self-protection. Adding such autonomic properties into existing applications is immensely useful for redeploying them in an environment other than they were developed for. Such transformed applications can be redeployed in different dynamic environments without the user making changes to the application. However, creating such autonomic software entities is a significant challenge because of the amount of code transformation required. This paper presents feasible solutions to such code transformations and identifies associated issues. To illustrate such code transformations, a technique is presented that inserts Java byte code with self-healing primitives and transforms it to become a self-healing component. Experiments show that such code transformations are challenging however they are worthwhile in order to provide transparent autonomic behavior