Dependability and Robustness: State of the Art and Challenges

Dependability is a broad concept which covers such aspects of computer systems like reliability, maintainability, and availability. Also because of this broadness, researches came up with related yet more focused notions such as self-healing and robustness. In this article, I discuss robustness in relation to dependability and make a distinction between these two. I outline the state of the art of the research in robustness and discuss required design practices leading to robust systems. In analogy to end-to-end argument, I present a new set of arguments called repairability which could help a designer resolve design decisions and choose a solution which potentially leads to a robust system.