The goal of dependability benchmarking is to provide generic ways for characterizing the behavior of components and computer systems in the presence of faults, allowing for the quantification of dependability measures. Beyond existing evaluation techniques, dependability benchmarking must provide a reproducible and cost-effective way of performing such a characterization, especially for compara...

This paper is two-fold. In the first part it tries to raise awareness on the level of complexity of future computer-based interconnected systems/infrastructures, at least as they are envisioned, and on the level of dependability we are today able to justify with confidence. It tries to motivate that fundamental methods and methodologies must be reconsidered, studied, exploited, assessed and app...

Descriptive arguments are an intrinsic part of the process of determining the dependability of any system, particularly in the case of safety critical systems. For such systems, safety cases are constructed to demonstrate that a system meets dependability requirements. This process includes the application of hazard analysis techniques. However, such techniques are error-prone, time consuming a...

The associations of childhood intelligence and dependability with adult mortality were examined in 1,181 people who were representative of the Scottish nation. Participants were born in 1936 and were followed for mortality from 1968 through early 2003. Higher intelligence and greater dependability were independent, significant predictors of lower mortality: With both factors entered together, t...

Web Services and service-oriented architectures (SOAs) represent a new paradigm for building distributed computing applications. In recent years, they have started to play a critical role in numerous e-Science and eCommerce applications. The advantages of Web Services, such as their loosely coupled architecture and standardized interoperability, make them a desirable platform, especially for de...

Emerging trends and challenges. Component-based software engineering supported by middleware technologies, such as CORBA Component Model (CCM) and Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), has emerged as a preferred way of developing enterprise distributed real-time and embedded (DRE) systems, such as smart buildings, modern office enterprises, and inflight entertainment systems. These systems consist of ap...