As software systems become more and more ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more critical. Given that solutions to these issues must be planned at the beginning of the design process, it is appropriate that these issues be addressed at the architectural level.

This book is inspired by the ICSE 2002 Workshop on Architecting Dependable Systems; it is devoted to current topics relevant for improving the state of the art for architecting dependability. Some of the 13 peer-reviewed papers presented were initially presented at the workshop, others were invited in order to achieve competent and complete coverage of all relevant aspects. The papers are organized in topical sections on

- architectures for dependability

- fault tolerance in software architectures

- dependability analysis in software architectures

- industrial experience.