The goal of SHADOWS is to increase the competitiveness of the European software industry by improving the reliability of the increasingly complex software systems, which have become critical to today’s business environments.

The SHADOWS project targets the problem of growing software complexity and its detrimental impact on  software reliability by introducing a new model-based paradigm for the development of self-healing  software systems. This paradigm improves the reliability of complex software systems by implementing an  innovative software solution for the automatic detection, localization, and healing of faults.

The prime deliverables of the project will be a widely applicable methodology and an integrated set of  coherent tools that provide capabilities for the self-healing of system failures during development time and  production. Our notion of system failure is broad and includes functional deviations, performance  bottlenecks, and concurrency problems. With these deliverables, we aim to achieve quantified and significant  improvements in system design productivity, system robustness, maintainability and quality, and the ability  to provide reliable services.

The SHADOWS approach extends the state-of-the-art by:

• Developing techniques that enable self-healing of new and important problem areas for which no other approach provides a solution.
• Targeting industrial applications, moving the self-healing paradigm from academia into the realm of the practical.
• Integrating technologies that work at different abstraction levels and address different classes of problems.