The demand for large-scale dependable, systems, such as Air Traffic Management, industrial plants and space systems, is attracting efforts of many word-leading European companies and SMEs in the area, and is expected to increase in the near future. The adoption of Off-The-Shelf (OTS) items plays a key role in such a scenario. OTS items allow mastering complexity and reducing costs and time-to-market; however, achieving these goals by ensuring dependability requirements at the same time is challenging. CRITICAL STEP project establishes a strategic collaboration between academic and industrial partners, and proposes a framework to support the development of dependable, OTS-based, critical systems. The book introduces methods and tools adopted by the critical systems industry, and surveys key achievements of the CRITICAL STEP project along four directions: fault injection tools, V&V of critical systems, runtime monitoring and evaluation techniques, and security assessment.

Domenico Cotroneo is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Computer and Systems Engineering of Federico II University of Naples. His main interests include dependability aspects of complex software systems, fault injection techniques, dependability analysis of mobile computing infrastructures, and field-based measurements techniques. He has been serving in the Program Committees of the most important international conferences in the field of dependable computing, such as DSN, ISSRE, EDCC, and PRDC. He is also the Project Leader and Coordinator of CRITICAL STEP (CRITICAL Software Technology for an Evolutionary Partnership) and has been the research leader of the many industry-funded projects in cooperation with CINI (Consorzio Interuniversitario Nazionale per l'Informatica).