MOTIVATION AND OUTCOME

The twin workshops on architecting dependable systems is an ambitious project, which aims to promote cross-fertilization between the communities of software architectures and dependability. Both communities will benefit from the clarification of approaches that have been previously tried and succeeded, as well as those that have been tried but have not yet shown to be successful. This not only helps avoid the reinvention of the wheel, but also clarifies and promotes areas where the most promising research may lie.

The aim of the workshops is to bring together the communities of software architectures and dependability to discuss the state of research and practice when dealing with dependability issues at the architecture level. The twin workshops are open to all researchers, system developers and users who are involved with or have an interest in dependability at the architecture level.

THEME

Architectural representations of systems have shown to be effective in assisting the understanding of broader system concerns by abstracting away from details of the system. The dependability of systems is defined as the reliance that can justifiably be placed on the service the system delivers. Dependability has become an important aspect of computer systems since everyday life increasingly depends on software. Although there is a large body of research in dependability, architectural level reasoning about dependability is only just emerging as an important theme in software engineering. This is due to the fact that dependability concerns are usually left until too late in the process of development. In addition, the complexity of emerging applications and the trend of building trustworthy systems from existing, untrustworthy components are urging dependability concerns be considered at the architectural level. Hence the questions that the software architecture and dependability communities are currently facing: what are the architectural principles involved in building dependable systems? How should these architectures be evaluated?