This paper shows the impact of the trade-off between reconfigurable and non-reconfigurable parts of the FPGA to the dependability characteristics of the whole design. Stochastic Petri nets have been used to compute reliability and dependability characteristics in a simple FPGA design with dynamically reconfigurable modules. Some parts of the design are not possible or proper to reconfigure dyna...

Autonomous systems are starting to appear in space exploration, elderly care and domestic service; they are particularly attractive for such applications because their advanced decisional mechanisms allow them to execute complex missions in uncertain environments. However, systems embedding such mechanisms simultaneously raise new concerns regarding their dependability. We aim in this paper to ...

Our society is faced with an ever increasing dependence on computing systems, which lead to question ourselves about the limits of their dependability, and to attempt to identih avenues fo r improving the situation. In order to respond these questions, a global conceptual and terminological framework is needed, which is first given. The limits in dependability are then addressed, from technical...

In this paper we propose to incorporate the Dependability Explicit Computing (DepEx) ideas into a law-governed approach in order to build dependable open multi-agent systems. We show that the law specification can explicitly incorporate dependability concerns, collect data and publish them in a metadata registry. This data can be used to realize DepEx and, for example, it can help to guide desi...

We argue for the importance of human error as a significant and oft-overlooked factor in system dependability, and contend that human behavior must be considered in both dependability benchmarks and high-dependability system designs. We support our claims with data illustrating that human-induced failures consistently account for half of all outages, and show that human error accompanies even t...

Dependability [1] is a very important aspect of a computing or communication system. Modelling and analysis is a prominent means for system dependability evaluation [2]. The existing dependability modelling and analysis work for large systems like communication networks focus on the static issues (such as connectivity), mainly due to the increasing complexity and thus the limitations of insuffi...

Whilst there is no consensus on the exact definition of dependability, many agree that it is a composite term consisting of many different non-orthogonal attributes. These can be in conflict or in harmony. This characteristic of dependability inevitably results in compromises and trade-offs being made during the design process. During the evolution of a dependable system, it is important that s...

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 this evaluation either as stand alone assessmen...

Direct analysis of failures from the field of application is an effective practice to understand the actual dependability behavior of an operational system. However, despite its wide use over the last four decades on a large variety of systems, field data analysis has rarely been applied to wireless networks. Users accessing the Internet ubiquitously through these networks are increasing, and t...

We present a method to add dependability features to component-based software systems. The method is applicable if the dependability features add new behavior to the system, but do not change its basic functionality. The idea is to start with a software architecture whose central component is an application component that implements the behavior of the system in the normal case. The application...