To obtain a coating with both self-healing and redox catalytic ability to protect a metal substrate from corrosion under aggressive environment is strongly desired. Herein, we report the design and fabrication of intelligent polyaniline-polyacrylic acid/polyethyleneimine (PANI-PAA/PEI) multilayer composite coatings by spin assembly. The main influencing factors, including solution concentration (c) and disk rotating speed (omega) were studied in order to gain excellent performance. The resulting multilayer coatings with thickness in a range from 0.47 to 2.94 pin can heal severe structural damages and sustain a superior anticorrosive performance for 120h in 3.5% NaCl. The PANI-PAA layer enhances the anti-corrosion property and PEI layer contributes to the self-healing ability as well as their multilayer combination strengthens them. The improved self-healing ability is attributed to the rearrangement and reversible non-covalent interactions of the PANI-PAA and PEI layers that facilitates electrostatic repairing. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.