Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) are increasingly pervasive in modern society due to their growing use in many complex applications of our everyday life, such as autonomous delivery drones and medical robotics. These systems, interacting with the environment, are often mission- or safety-critical systems and must therefore satisfy strict dependability requirements. Such requirements include reliability, maintainability, and availability goals, but also specific constraints, including performance, power, energy, or timing. It is arguably crucial for safety-critical CPS to provide dependability against faults incurred by mobile and dynamic physical environments, which is very challenging, especially if fault tolerance is provided at the cost of time and computation. Hardware is getting more and more complex and the semiconductor scaling is pushing towards the smallest size possible, both with the goal to increase the available computational power. These two trends, in addition to the employment of emerging technologies, like non-volatile memory, increase the reliability threats. Safety-critical hardware struggles to provide sufficient computational capabilities to modern applications, which often need to resort to Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) components rather than specialized and fault tolerant hardware. Hence, the use of COTS is leading to a shift from fault-tolerance to fault-resilience: the hardware is no longer considered capable of tolerating any fault, thus modern systems need to be designed, at hardware and software levels, in a way that are able to self-recover from errors. Novel techniques, solutions, algorithms, and tools are thus needed to tackle the design and development of CPS that needs to guarantee dependability and safety.
This special issue offers substantial contributions in several fields, with the goal of improving their resilience against faults. To accommodate the numerous submissions, this special issue is divided into two parts. Part I includes 8 papers published in this issue, while the remaining papers will be featured in Part II, which will appear in a subsequent issue.