Most of critical activities in the areas of communications (telephone, Internet), energy & fluids (electricity, gas, water), transportation (railways, airlines, road), life related (health, emergency response, and security), manufacturing (chips, computers, cars) or financial (credit cards, on-line transactions), or refinery& chemical systems rely on networked communication and information systems. Moreover, there are other dedicated systems for data mining, recommenders, sensing, conflict detection, intrusion detection, or maintenance that are complementary to and interact with the former ones.

With large scale and complex systems, their parts expose different static and dynamic features that interact with each others; some systems are more stabile than others, some are more scalable, while others exhibit accurate feedback loops, or are more reliable or fault-tolerant.

Inter-system dependability and intra-system feature dependability require more attention from both theoretical and practical aspects, such as a more formal specification of operational and non-operational requirements, specification of synchronization mechanisms, or dependency exception handing. Considering system and feature dependability becomes crucial for data protection and recoverability when implementing mission critical applications and services.

Static and dynamic dependability, time-oriented, or timeless dependability, dependability perimeter, dependability models, stability and convergence on dependable features and systems, and dependability control and self-management are some of the key topics requiring special treatment. Platforms and tools supporting the dependability requirements are needed.

As a particular case, design, development, and validation of tools for incident detection and decision support became crucial for security and dependability in complex systems. It is challenging how these tools could span different time scales and provide solutions for survivability that range from immediate reaction to global and smooth reconfiguration through policy based management for an improved resilience. Enhancement of the self-healing properties of critical infrastructures by planning, designing and simulating of optimized architectures tested against several realistic scenarios is also aimed.

To deal with dependability, sound methodologies, platforms, and tools are needed to allow system adaptability. The balance dependability/adaptability may determine the life scale of a complex system and settle the right monitoring and control mechanisms. Particular challenging issues pertaining to context-aware, security, mobility, and ubiquity require appropriate mechanisms, methodologies, formalisms, platforms, and tools to support adaptability.

Improvement of the risk and crisis management in critical infrastructures is achieved by the design of new models, countermeasures, and incident management tools. These new models will help to mitigate the cascading and escalading effects induced by different kind of dependencies present in communication and information systems. Development of decision support tools for critical infrastructures should be validated by scenarios based on different case studies.

We are looking for contributions on the actual trends in coping with these new challenges within the research community and industry. We expect some lessons learnt and description of the results coming from different R&D projects (e.g., like ones in the EC 6th Framework Program), or any other worldwide initiatives. We hope we will be able to identify the gaps between the needs and today's available solutions along with new challenges and potential for future directions.

DEPEND 2011 will provide a forum for detailed exchange of ideas, techniques, and experiences with the goal of understanding the academia and the industry trends related to the new challenges in dependability on critical and complex information systems.

The topics suggested by the conference can be discussed in term of concepts, state of the art, research, standards, implementations, running experiments, applications, and industrial case studies. Authors are invited to submit complete unpublished papers, which are not under review in any other conference or journal in the following, but not limited to, topic areas. All tracks are open to both research and industry contributions.

Dependability facets
Fundamentals on dependability
Formalisms for dependability
Managing and control in dependable systems
Inter-system and intra-system dependability
Operational and non-operational requirements
Software and hardware dependability
Dependability design and specification
Synchronization mechanisms and dependency exception handing
Data protection, recoverability, fault-tolerance
Trust and dependability
Static and dynamic dependability
Time-oriented or time-agnostic dependability
Dependability perimeter and dependability models
Stability and convergence on dependable features and systems
Dependability discovery
Dependability control and self-management
Dependability degradation of running software and services

Adaptability and (self)adaptability
Fundamental models and adaptability mechanisms
Principles of (self)adaptability
Adaptive replication models and protocols
Adaptable structures and behaviors
Context-aware adaptability
Perceived dependability and adaptability
Adaptive and reflexive models and protocols
Management and control of (self)adaptable systems
Platforms and tool supporting (self)adaptability
Autonomic and autonomous adaptation

Adaptability and dependability
Dependability and adaptability for functional and non-functional features
Adaptability and dependability gap
Adaptability and dependability as complementing features
Context-aware adaptable and dependable design
Inter- and intra-systems transactions
Enforcing mechanisms for application level fault tolerance
Explicit and implicit control of quality of service and contracts
Dependability and adaptability in cloud and autonomic computing
Verification and validation of highly adaptable and dependable systems
Scalability aspects in dependable and adaptable systems
Research projects and topics on dependability and adaptability
Standards on system dependability and adaptability

Dependability and security
Integration of security, dependability, and adaptability concepts
Building and preserving scalable, secure and resilient architectures
Security models/architectures and threat models
Trade-off and negotiation of dependability and security properties
Dependability modeling and dynamic management policies
Verification and validation (including model checking) of dependable software architectures
Real time detection and recovery capabilities against intrusions, malfunctions and failures
Redundancy and reconfiguration architectures
Integrated response architectures
Planning of optimal configurations for anticipated operational modes
Modeling of networks and Information Systems
Simulation of modeled configurations
Fast reconfiguration with priority to critical services
Incident (including intrusion) detection and quick containment

Trust and system dependability
Semantics and models of trust
Dynamics of trust
Trust negotiation and management
Trusted systems from untrusted parts
Trust-based secure architectures
Trust metrics assessment and threat analysis
Trust in peer-to-peer and open source systems
Trust in mobile networks
Trust management, reputation management, and identity management
Trust, security, and dependability

Dependability, adaptability, and new technologies
Dependability and adaptability in service oriented architectures
Principles for adaptive and dependable distributed systems
Dependability and adaptability in P2P and overlay systems
Middleware protocols and mechanisms to support adaptability and dependability
Adaptability and dependability in mobile and pervasive systems
Service composition in highly dependable and adaptable environments
Dynamic, loosely-coupled, and ad-hoc environments
Group membership services in failure scenarios with network partitions
Social networks and dependability in dynamic communities
Cross-organization heterogeneity
Aerospace system dependability
Dependable software for life critical applications

INSTRUCTION FOR THE AUTHORS

Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to one of the IARIA Journals.

Publisher: XPS (Xpert Publishing Services)
Archived: ThinkMindTM Digital Library (free access)
Submitted for indexing:
- ISI Thompson Conference Proceedings Citation Index (CPCI)
- Elsevier's EI Compendex Database, EI’s Engineering Information Index
- DBLP, IET INSPEC, and other relevant specialized indexes.
- Other indexes are being considered

Important deadlines:
Submission (full paper) March 23, 2011
Notification April 30, 2011
Registration May 15, 2011
Camera ready May 22, 2011