Marie-Odile Cordier and Yannick Pencolé and Louise Travé-Massuyès and Thierry Vidal Caractérisation des systèmes autoguérissants : diagnostiquer ce que l'on va réparer , I3 (Information - Interaction - Intelligence) , Ed. Cepaduès 978.2.85428.817.9 , Vol. 8 , No. 2 , 2009 Abstract Nowadays, computer architectures need to be self-healing, which means capable of surviving autonomously the occurrence of faults, still managing to provide the desired functionalities. That is true for instance for Web Services, to which we are currently applying this theoretical work. Designers of such systems need tools helping them to assess beforehands the self-healability of their system. A first step towards such tools is to formally define what self-healability precisely means. Diagnosability is the ability of a system to be self-aware about its current state by analysing the observations that are received ; repairability can be defined as the ability of a system to react to faults by applying repair actions. We define selfhealability as a joint property, which achieves for the first time a bridge between diagnosability, for which we had to extend the classical definition, and repairability, for which we provide a first formal definition. A theorem can then be proved, leading naturally to a practical and tractable self-healability checking algorithm. Finally, it is shown how the above results can be used to suggest strategies to help designers building self-healing systems. This web site is maintained by René Quiniou using the Weave system from the Caravel project: http://www-caravel.inria.fr. Last modification: 10-07-2011 09:54:25 Version française