Panel statement: why progress in (composite) fault tolerant real-time systems has been slow (-er than expected... & what can we do about it?)

The pervasiveness of computers in our current IT driven society (transportation, e-commerce, e-transactions, communication, process control), also implies our growing dependency on their "correct" functionality. In many a case, the real value of the systems and also our usage of these systems comes, in part, based on the dependency (real or perceived) we are consequently willing to put into the provisioning of the services i.e., the implicit or explicit assurance of trust we put for sustained delivery of desired services. Some systems are considered as safety-critical (flight/reactor control etc), though others are accorded varied degrees of criticality. Nevertheless, our expectancy extends to obtaining the proper services when the system is fault-free and especially when it encounters perturbations (design or operational), e.g., electromagnetic interference or a lightning strike for an aircraft. Consequently, it is important to qualitatively and quantitatively associate some measures of trust in the system\´s ability to "actually" deliver us the desired services in the presence of faults. This is often termed as "dependability" measures for a system with a plethora of fault-tolerance (FT) strategies to help achieve desired levels of dependability. As before, dependability entails the sustained delivery of services, be they service-critical or cost-critical, regardless of the perturbations encountered during their operation.