*** EXTENDED DEADLINE *** 16th Workshop on Dependability and Fault Tolerance (VERFE 2021), June 2021

Background and Focus: Although the basic reliability of hardware and software components has improved
over decades, their increasing number causes severe problems. Moreover, in recent years it can be observed
that an increasing number of devices are integrated into environments of other physical components such
as cars or digital systems. Here, the complexity and number of interactions with these components creates
problems with regard to maintaining a dependable operation of the entire system in case of faults or external
disturbances. While this is not a problem with microprocessors, shrinking feature sizes, higher complexity,
lower voltages, and higher clock frequencies increase the probability of design-, manufacturing-, and operational
faults, making fault tolerance techniques in general purpose processors to be of crucial importance
in the future. As simple solutions (such as TMR) can easily get too expensive, the ability to trade increased
reliability against performance/power overhead will become important, resulting in light-weight fault tolerance
techniques implemented in hardware, but controllable from higher software layers.
This workshop aims at presenting contributions and work-in-progress from the research area of dependable
and fault-tolerant computing in order to bring together scientists working in related fields.

Topics Contributions on the topic of “Dependable Embedded Systems“ are of particular interest; contributions
on general topics of dependability and fault tolerance are also welcome but not limited to:

•    dependable computer systems, networks and embedded systems
•    dependability of mechatronic systems
•    fault-tolerant systems and system components
•    safety-critical applications
•    highly available systems
•    real-time and performance guarantees
•    testing of hardware and software
•    fault detection and fault treatment
•    failure prediction

•    modeling, simulation and evaluation of fault-tolerant systems
•    reliability models for hardware and software
•    validation and verification
•    fault models and fault abstraction
•    fault injection techniques
•    on-chip fault-tolerance
•    software-controlled fault tolerance
•    fault-tolerant processor architecture
•    fault-tolerance in operating systems, storage and database systems

The workshop will focus on research presentations as well as brainstorming sessions.
Therefore, two kinds of contributions are welcome:

•  research papers documenting results of scientific investigations and
•  position papers proposing strategies or discussing open problems.

Accepted papers will be published by VDE and IEEExplore.
Papers should be in English and formatted according to IEEE eXpress ”conference mode”.
Selected papers will appear in the FERS Journal (ISSN 0724-5319).

Deadlines:
Submission: *** EXTENDED *** April 30th, 2021 (ext. abstracts (3-4 pages) or full papers (max. 8 pages), PDF) to: bernhard.fechner@fernuni-hagen.de
Notification: May 10th, 2021
Camera-ready: May 24th, 2021 (max. 8 pages)