DEPEND 2009 - The Second International Conference on Dependability DEPEND 2009

The Second International Conference on Dependability DEPEND 2009


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.

The international conference on dependability, DEPEND 2009, is based on the positive participation and feedback at DEPEND 2008 workshop that addressed new approaches dealing with today's limitations and potential solutions.

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 2009 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, standards, implementations, running experiments and applications. 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:

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

INSTRUCTION FOR THE AUTHORS

The DEPEND 2009 Proceedings will be published by IEEE Computer Society Press and on-line via IEEE XPlore Digital Library. IEEE will index the papers with major indexes. Authors of selected papers will be invited to submit extended versions to one of the IARIA Journals.

Important deadlines:

Submission (full paper) January 20, 2009
Authors notification February 25, 2009
Registration March 15, 2009
Camera ready March 20, 2009

Only .pdf or .doc files will be accepted for paper submission. All received papers will be acknowledged via an automated system.

Final author manuscripts will be 8.5" x 11" (two columns IEEE format), not exceeding 6 pages; max 4 extra pages allowed at additional cost. The formatting instructions can be found on the Instructions page. Helpful information for paper formatting can be found on the here.

Once you receive the notification of paper acceptance, you will be provided by the IEEE CS Press an online author kit with all the steps an author needs to follow to submit the final version. The author kits URL will be included in the letter of acceptance.

Poster Forum

Posters are welcome. Please submit the contributions following the instructions for the regular submissions using the "Submit a Paper" button and selecting the track/workshop preference as "POSTER : Poster Forum". Submissions are expected to be 6-8 slide deck. Posters will not be published in the Proceedings. One poster with all the slides together should be used for discussions. Presenters will be allocated a space where they can display the slides and discuss in an informal manner.

Work in Progress

Work-in-progress contributions are welcome. Please submit the contributions following the instructions for the regular submissions using the "Submit a Paper" button and selecting the track/workshop preference as "WIP: Work in Progress". Authors should submit a four-page (maximum) text manuscript in IEEE double-column format including the authors' names, affiliations, email contacts. Contributors must follow the conference deadlines, describing early research and novel skeleton ideas in the areas of the conference topics. The work will be published in the conference proceedings.

Technical marketing/business/positioning presentations

The conference initiates a series of business, technical marketing, and positioning presentations on the same topics. Speakers must submit a 10-12 slide deck presentations with substantial notes accompanying the slides, in the .ppt format (.pdf-ed). The slide deck will not be published in the conference¡¯s CD collection. Please send your presentations to petre-AT-iaria.org.

Tutorials

Tutorials provide overviews of current high interest topics. They should be about three hours long. One page with the title, tutorial summary, and a short bio are expected. Please send your proposals to petre-AT-iaria.org

Panel proposals:

The organizers encourage scientists and industry leaders to organize dedicated panels dealing with controversial and challenging topics and paradigms. Panel moderators are asked to identify their guests and manage that their appropriate talk supports timely reach our deadlines. Moderators must specifically submit an official proposal, indicating their background, panelist names, their affiliation, the topic of the panel, as well as short biographies.

For more information, petre-AT-iaria.org

Workshop proposals

We welcome workshop proposals on issues complementary to the topics of this conference. Your requests should be forwarded to petre-AT-iaria.org.