After successful completion of the course, students are able to construct and model dependable systems, thereby using competences about types of faults, fault/error/failure models, error detection and analysis, redundancy strategies, dependability modeling.

Cognitive and practical results: After successful completion of the course, students are able to assess the risk computer systems, improve the dependability of computer systems, and evaluate dependability attibutes by tool-based failure modeling techniques (including simulation).

Results in social competence, qualifications in innovation, creativity: After completing this course, students will be able to assess the risks and construct safe computer systems, to improve the dependability of systems, and to analyse, judge, and document the dependability of system variants.

Course contents:

• Foundations: Dependability, reliability, availability, safety, availability, MTTF
• quanititative analysis: block diagrams, fault trees, markov processes
• Safety, fault models, maintenance, aging, design errors
• Fault-tolerant computer systems: redundancy, error latency, voting, recovery blocks, N-version programming, synchronization
• case studies of dependable and fault tolerant systems
• tool-based modeling of dependable systems

Technical and theoretical skills are taught in lectures. Practical skills are obtained in lab assignments, where students get experience in dependability modeling and evaluation. Modeling result have to be summarized in a lab report.

ECTS breakdown: 3 ECTS = 75 hours; 20 lectures, 20 preparation and study, 1 exam, 2 lab introduction, 32 lab homeworks and reports.

Grading is based on results from lab assignments and an oral exam.

Materials taught in the following modules of the curriculum: Foundations of digital systems, theoretical computer science and logic, probability theory and stochastic processes, computer architectures and operating systems, microcontrollers and operating systems.