Indeed, some forms of self-stabilization are incorporated into many modern computer and telecommunications networks, since it gives them the ability to cope with faults that were not foreseen in the design of the algorithm.
As a result, Dijkstra's paper received the 2002 ACM PODC Influential-Paper Award, one of the highest recognitions in the distributed computing community.
It was only ten years later when Leslie Lamport pointed out the importance of Dijkstra's work at a 1983 conference called Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing that researchers [4] directed their attention to this elegant fault-tolerance concept.
I regard self-stabilization to be a very important concept in fault tolerance and to be a very fertile field for research.
The property of self-stabilization enables a distributed algorithm to recover from a transient fault regardless of its nature.
Dijkstra's paper, which introduces the concept of self-stabilization, presents an example in the context of a "token ring"—a network of computers ordered in a circle.
Since traditional methods for detecting an error[7] were often very difficult and time-consuming, such a behavior was considered desirable.
More recently, researchers have presented newer methods for light-weight error detection for self-stabilizing systems using local checking.
These local detection methods simplified the task of designing self-stabilizing algorithms considerably.
[13] The idea behind these is that when only a small number of errors occurs, the recovery time can (and should) be made short.
[6] New approaches to Dijkstra's work emerged later on such as the case of Krzysztof Apt and Ehsan Shoja's proposition, which demonstrated how self-stabilization can be naturally formulated using the standard concepts of strategic games, particularly the concept of an improvement path.
In fact, a class of distributed algorithms do not have the property of local checking: the legitimacy of the network state cannot be evaluated by a single process.
In classical self-stabilization theory, arbitrary changes are viewed as errors where no guarantees are given until the system has stabilized again.
A Theory that started within the area of self-stabilization is verifying (in a distributed manner) that the collection of the states of the nodes in a network obeys some predicate.
The International Colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity (SIRROCO) Prize for Innovation in Distributed Computing of 2024 was awarded for initiating that theory.