Guest Editorial Special Section on Applied Software Aging and Rejuvenation

Since the publication of the first paper on software aging and rejuvenation by Huang et al. in 1995 [1], considerable research has been devoted to this topic. It deals with the phenomenon that continuously-running software systems may show an increasing failure rate and/or a degrading performance, either because error conditions accumulate inside the running system or because the rate at which faults are activated and errors are propagated is positively correlated with system uptime. Software rejuvenation relates to techniques counteracting aging (for example, by regularly stopping and restarting the software) in order to remove aging effects and to proactively prevent failures from occurring.