Guest Editor's Introduction: Special Section on High Dependability Systems

The papers in this special section focus on high dependability systems. The continuous scaling of microelectronic technology has enabled electronic devices to become more and more pervasive and widespread. Nowadays most of the objects surrounding us include electronic devices, which are connected together through the Internet, creating the well-known Internet of Things. A huge amount of data is collected, processed and exchanged among these objects, on a daily basis. Humans’ life is becoming more and more dependent on decisions taken on the basis of such data and their processing. Autonomous vehicles and robots, trained and guided by such data, are becoming more and more popular. Their dependability (that is reliability, availability, safety and security) emerges as an obvious, mandatory constraint, that constitutes a challenge to enable the development of more and more autonomous systems. Major, worldwide efforts are consequently conducted to provide hardware and software solutions for high dependability systems.