This book provides an overview of the work of two successive ESPRIT Basic Research Projects on Predictably Dependable Computing Systems (PDCS), as well as their major achievements. The purpose of the projects has been "to contribute to making the process of designing and constructing dependable computing systems much more predictable and cost-effective." The book contains a carefully edited selection of papers on all four main topics in PDCS: fault prevention, fault tolerance, fault removal, and fault forecasting. Problems of real-time and distributed systems, system structuring, qualitative...