Dependability

The term dependability subsumes such topics as reliability, availability, safety and security. In dependability, research areas covered include

• fault tolerance and exception handling in concurrent systems;
• object-oriented mechanisms for satisfying non-functional requirements;
• safety-critical systems,
• stochastic modelling;
• determining and modelling organisational requirements for dependable systems;
• system security;
• computer architectures; and
• formal methods.

There is a clear emphasis in the dependability research on the early stages of design in preference to attempts to obtain dependability attributes by post-hoc methods. It is clear that it is expensive - if not impossible - to remove mistakes introduced at the early design stages; this is especially the case with blunders which give rise to poorly chosen architectures.

Our main recent developments in this regard have included the concept of Co-ordinated Atomic (CA) Actions. This is a powerful new system structuring technique that is a generalisation of nested transactions, conversations and exception handling. We have evaluated this technique via a number of industrial case studies, including one whose design was subjected to extensive formal verification - something that was made practicable by the structuring imposed by the use of CA actions. Another significant development has shown how reflection and meta-object protocols can be deployed so as to add fault tolerance strategies, and to impose security controls, on pre-existing object-oriented systems.

The dissemination activities of the Newcastle Dependability Group are extensive: The Centre for Software Reliability (CSR) was founded in 1982 by Professor Anderson, jointly with City University, and operates the safety and reliability community clubs which have 2500 members and stage about ten technology transfer events each year.

More information about the group can be found on their website.

People

Group Leader and Contact Point

Prof. Tom Anderson, Professor, Director of CSR

Academic Staff

Prof. Tom Anderson, Professor, Director of CSR

Dr. John Fitzgerald, Reader

Dr. Cristina Gacek, Lecturer

Prof. Michael Harrison, Director of Informatics Research Institute

Prof. Cliff Jones, Professor, Research Director

Dr. Marta Pietkiewicz-Koutny, Lecturer

Prof. Brian Randell, Emeritus Professor, and Senior Research Investigator

Dr. Steve Riddle, Lecturer

Prof. Peter Ryan, Professor

Dr. Neil Speirs, Senior Lecturer

Dr. Robert Stroud, Reader

Dr. Jeff Yan, Lecturer

Research Associates

Zoe Andrews

Budiman Arief

Paul Arkley

Jeremy Bryans

Joseph Coleman

Xiaofeng Gong

David Greathead

Neil Henderson

Tony Lawrie

Panayiotis Periorellis

Alexander Romanovsky

PhD Students

Saleh Alfuraih

Salem Aljareh

Nezar Almutadares

Mohammad Alsaeed

Omar Batarfi

Yuhui Chen

Martin Ellis

Carl Gamble

Chushu Gao

Alexei Iliasov

Qurat-ul-Ain Inayat

Nigel Jefferson

Nikolaos Michalodimitrakis

Igor Mozolevsky

Thea Peacock

William Stephenson

Richard Wilkinson

Visiting Staff

Dr. James Armstrong, Guest Member of Staff

Dr. Peter Gorm Larsen, Visiting Lecturer

Mr. Torgrim Lauritsen, Visiting Researcher

Vis. Prof. Mike Martin, Visiting Professor

Dr. Stephen Paynter, Visiting Lecturer

Dr. Richard Snow, Retired Member of Staff