Actors form a tree with actors being parents to the actors they've created.
As a parent, the actor is responsible for handling its children’s failures (so-called supervision), forming a chain of responsibility, all the way to the top. When an actor crashes, its parent can either restart or stop it, or escalate the failure up the hierarchy of actors. This enables a clean set of semantics for managing failures in a concurrent, distributed system and allows for writing highly fault-tolerant systems that self-heal.