In the industry 4.0 era, complex systems such as cyber-physical systems (CPS), machine learning-based systems, and real-time systems are becoming increasingly prevalent in both industrial applications and daily life. These systems are composed of numerous interacting components, leading to complex behaviours. Ensuring the dependability of such systems is crucial, as failures or deviations from requirements could result in severe consequences, including potential loss of human lives.
While extensive research has been conducted to enhance the safety, reliability, maintainability, and availability of these systems through formal methods and engineering techniques, there still exists a gap between the vast number of interacting components and the scalability of current approaches. Therefore, this special issue aims to address this gap by collecting innovative and high-quality research achievements in dependability theories, techniques, and experimental studies related to complex systems.
The focus is on soliciting novel techniques or adaptations of existing techniques that tackle issues such as component interactions and real-time scheduling. By bringing together cutting-edge research in dependable computing for complex systems, the special issue will contribute to the development of more effective approaches to ensure the dependability and quality of critical systems in the industry.
The special issue aims to gather contributions that advance the field of dependable computing for complex systems. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
(1) Software and hardware reliability.
(2) Software aging and rejuvenation.
(3) Software testing, verification, and validation.
(4) Techniques and approaches for safety-critical systems.
(5) Dependability measurement, modeling, evaluation, and tools.
(6) Dependability techniques and methodologies for complex systems.
(7) Dependable system design.
(8) Self-healing, self-protecting, and self-adaptive systems.
(9) Fault-tolerant techniques.
(10) Studies on non-deterministic bugs, aging-related bugs, etc.
(11) Quality assurance in server systems, cyber-physical systems, learning-based systems, etc.
(12) Internet of things (IoT) architectures, protocols, security, and privacy.
(13) Modeling and simulation of complex systems.
(14) Analysis of software faults/bugs, errors, and failures.
(15) Fault localization for complex bugs.
(16) Repairing and re-engineering for complex systems.
(17) Analytical, empirical, and experimental studies of any of the above topics.