Topics of Interest

The track provides a forum for scientists and engineers in academia and industry to present and discuss their latest research findings on selected topics in dependable and adaptive distributed systems and complex services. The topics of particular interest include, but are not limited to:

• Architectural and infrastructural principles for adaptive and dependable distributed systems.
• Adaptivity and dependability in service oriented architectures.
• Trust and dependability as complementary and competing aspects. Integration of security and dependability concepts. Balancing and negotiation of dependability and security properties.
• Dependability in complex service oriented environments, GRID-computing, and P2P-systems. Concertation, orchestration, coordination, and context-awareness (context-modeling).
• Middleware support for reunification of network segments and reconciliation of divergent replicas. Consideration of alternative techniques for dynamic configuration and/or reconfiguration.
• New middleware protocols, that are able to work in a peer-to-peer manner in cross-organisational environments and to tackle the challenges of massive scale and mobility.
• Data replication strategies, interfaces, and standards. Interaction of distributed databases with middleware systems.
• Adaptive, optimistic replication models and protocols.
• Group communication and group membership services in failure scenarios with network partitions.
• Other fault tolerance techniques, including transactions and explicit control of quality of service properties.
• Autonomous behaviour and self-* properties.
• Partial and probabilistic approaches for replication, group membership, and distributed consensus in loosely-coupled and ad-hoc environments to improve dependability.
• Support for dependability and adaptiveness in component-based systems (e.g. component frameworks, container services, deployment, composition and substitution of components, building trusted systems from untrusted components).
• Trading of dependability and adaptability with other non-functional requirements like integrity (consistency) or performance. Approaches to improve the scalability of dependable and adaptive systems.
• Foundations and formal methods (e.g., rigorous development of dependable systems, verification and refinement of fault tolerant systems, techniques and mechanisms ensuring application level fault tolerance).
• System design, modeling, development and tool support for dependable and adaptive systems:
  • Software development methods, tools, techniques, and design patterns, including UML- and MDA-support for dependability and adaptiveness.
  • Tool support for orchestration, choreography, and coordination of complex services.
  • Design and programming abstractions to manage the complexity of adaptive mechanisms.
  • Policies and decision making for adaptation.
  • Aspect oriented programming for dependability.
  • Metrics, measures, and parameters for quantitative approaches to dependability.
• Evaluation and experience reports of dependable and adaptive distributed systems and services:
  • Experience reports from various application areas such as context-aware pervasive computing, safety-critical avionics and CNS systems (communication, navigation, and surveillance), embedded systems (e.g.automotive), and adaptive technologies in mobile and ad-hoc computing.
  • Comparison of detection-, containment-, recovery-, and fault tolerance strategies for distributed systems.
  • Analytical and/or experimental evaluation of replication techniques.
  • Application of middleware techniques to support reconfigurability and/or adaptability.
• Holistic dependability approaches: Social, cultural, psychological, economical, managerial, and educational aspects of dependability.