As software systems become ubiquitous, the issues of dependability
become more and more crucial. Given that solutions to these issues must
be considered from the very beginning of the design process, it is
reasonable that dependability is addressed at the architectural level.
This book was born of an effort to bring together the research
communities of software architectures and dependability.
This state-of-the-art survey contains 18 expanded and peer-reviewed
papers based on the carefully selected contributions to the Workshop on
Architecting Dependable Systems (WADS 2006), organized at the 2006
International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN 2006),
held in Philadelphia, PA, USA, in June 2006. It also contains a number
of invited papers written by recognized experts in the area. The papers
are organized in topical sections on architectural description
languages, architectural components and patterns, architecting
distributed systems, and architectural assurances for dependability.