Dependability

The IFIP Working Group 10.4[3] on "Dependable Computing and Fault Tolerance" plays a role in synthesizing the technical community's progress in the field and organizes two workshops each year to disseminate the results.

Dependability can be broken down into three elements: Some sources hold that word was coined in the nineteen-teens in Dodge Brothers automobile print advertising.

Avizienis et al. define the following Dependability Attributes: As these definitions suggested, only Availability and Reliability are quantifiable by direct measurements whilst others are more subjective.

[2] Practically, applying security measures to the appliances of a system generally improves the dependability by limiting the number of externally originated errors.

Since the mechanism of a Fault-Error-Chain is understood it is possible to construct means to break these chains and thereby increase the dependability of a system.

Dependability means are intended to reduce the number of failures made visible to the end users of a system.

Based on how faults appear or persist, they are classified as: Some works on dependability [12] use structured information systems, e.g. with SOA, to introduce the attribute survivability, thus taking into account the degraded services that an Information System sustains or resumes after a non-maskable failure.

With the generalisation of networked information systems, accessibility was introduced to give greater importance to users' experience.