Third workshop on proactive failure avoidance, recovery, and maintenance (PFARM)

Over the last decade, research on dependable computing has undergone a shift from reactive towards proactive methods: In classical fault tolerance a system reacts to errors or component failures in order to prevent them from turning into system failures, and maintenance follows fixed, time-based plans. However, due to an ever increasing system complexity, use of commercial-off-the-shelf components, virtualization, ongoing system patches and updates and dynamicity such approaches have become difficult to apply. Therefore, a new area in dependability research has emerged focusing on proactive approaches that start acting before a problem arises in order to increase time-to-failure and/or reduce time-to-repair. These techniques frequently build on the anticipation of upcoming problems based on runtime monitoring. Industry and academia use several terms for such techniques, each focusing on different aspects, including self-computing, autonomic computing, proactive fault management, trustworthy computing, software rejuvenation, or preventive/proactive maintenance. © 2011 IEEE.