Self-testing and self-healing via mobile agents

Today, in the world, there are more embedded systems then people. The use of digital systems pervades all areas of our lives, and this trend of producing digitally-aware environments will keep growing. In the future it will be normal to live surrounded by large numbers of heterogeneous devices, from domestic systems to complex applications like automotive, transportations, and medical control systems, which will communicate together through distributed and wireless interfaces. These complex heterogeneous digital systems will provide higher productivity and greater flexibility, but it is also accepted that they will not be fault-free. Moreover, the percentage of faults detected by any Endof-Production test will not be enough to guarantee the level of availability and reliability required by the market. In this context, the ability of a complex digital system to detect and possibly correct a fault (self-healing) plays a critical role. The state-of-the-art of the research in digital systems’ self-healing has only recently started to address this problem from a system-level point of view.