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Technical Content:

There have been significant technical advances in the dependability of many complex systems over the last twenty years. Partly in consequence, accident and incident rates have fallen across a range of industries. However, these advances are often offset by increasing exposure. For example, reductions in the accident rate may be offset by rising numbers of departures in the aviation industries. Improvements in the engineering of safety-critical software are offset by the increasing use of programmable systems within application areas that would not have been considered ten or twenty years ago. It seems likely that these changes in both the supply and demand of safety-critical systems do not occur by chance. Innovations in dependability are linked to the increasing need to deploy these applications.

In other areas, new threats and hazards are placing increasing demands on safety and security engineering. It seems clear that existing methods of risk assessment cannot easily be applied to analyse the potential consequences of climate change, especially where political influence and public opinion must inform engineering decisions. Similarly, concerns over terrorist attacks across Europe, Asia and North America are revealing new vulnerabilities. These areas of concern are growing as ICT and SCADA systems combine with market deregulation to increase dependencies between many different infrastructures.

Given these broad, long-term changes it is critical that we find ways of learning from any adverse events that occur. Incident and accident reporting systems are only one way in which we can inform safety management systems with direct operational experience. Conventional forms of risk assessment and resilience engineering must be supported by longer term contingency planning. However, there are many areas that cannot easily be addressed using existing techniques; these include but are not limited to:

• political and social factors affecting incident and accident reporting;
• learning from failure in critical infrastructure development and protection;
• the human factors contribution to long term risk;
• impact of insurance and financial services on engineering development;
• the validation of long-term contingency planning;
• the consideration of `external factors' (meteorological changes, pandemics etc) on long-term engineering decisions;
• cross-overs between security and safety in contingency planning.

Accepted papers will be gathered together for publication in a future special edition of Elsevier's Reliability Engineering and System Safety journal.

You can register for the workshop by emailing Joan Atkinson. The workshop is organised on behalf of the UK Safety-Critical Systems Club.

This workshop is co-located with DSN 2007 IEEE/IFIP Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks . Delegates can choose to attend either or both independently. Regsitration for DSN 2007 is via the link given above.

For more information please contact:

Prof. Chris Johnson, Dept. of Computing Science, Univ. of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ, Scotland.
Tel: +44 141 330 6053, Fax: +44 141 330 4913, johnson@dcs.gla.ac.uk