Proceedings of the 2007 workshop on Engineering fault tolerant systems

Abstract

Software and hardware systems have become increasingly used in many industrial sectors, such as manufacturing, energy supply, aerospace, transportation, communication and healthcare. Failures due to software or hardware malfunctions, users' mistakes and malicious intentions can have serious economics consequences, and can also endanger human life. Fault tolerance prevents system failures and is intended to ensure that it delivers the required service in spite of faults and errors which it might encounter and as such it is crucial for meeting high reliability and availability requirements. Fault tolerance engineering during the entire life cycle has been advocated by some researchers as one of the main approaches to ensuring the overall system dependability. In particular, different classes of faults, errors and failures must be identified and dealt with at each phase of software development, depending on the abstraction level used in modelling the software system under development. A number of studies have been conducted so far in these areas, but understanding where and how fault-tolerance should be integrated in the software life-cycle still requires major research efforts. This international workshop builds on this trend and aims at investigating how fault tolerance mechanisms can be taken into account when engineering complex software systems. To address the new problems the system developers are facing nowadays (such as identifying the places where fault tolerance means must be applied and the degree of fault tolerance that must be achieved) we need novel models to be applied at different abstraction levels (requirement, architecture and design models for fault tolerance, together with new implementation schemes), innovative technologies (tools and frameworks for implementing distributed fault tolerant systems) and advanced verification environments (to assess the achieved level of fault tolerance and to evaluate the dependability properties of the systems). Recently there has been growing interest in the areas directly related and overlapping with fault tolerance, such as system self-healing, resilience, self-adaptation and self-management. The topics related to engineering of systems with such properties are in the scope of the workshop as the intention is to improve the current understanding of how fault tolerance engineering can benefit from research on these areas. EFTS 2007 is the appropriate venue to reflect on the achievements of the researchers and practitioners in the fields of software engineering and fault tolerance, bringing together people from these two communities.