Distributed systems are at the centre of several scientific and technological trends, which aim to make them increasingly large scale, heterogeneous, open, autonomous, and situated. Engineering efforts are devoted to harnessing the complexity of such systems to support applications and services upon which users can depend. Traditional issues of distributed systems include communication, coordination, consistency, availability, replication, and fault tolerance. Dealing with such issues often involves making trade-offs, as suggested by constructs like the CAP theorem. Additional issues like guaranteeing soft/hard deadlines, synchronising the state of physical/software components, promoting efficiency through deployment relocation, and self-management are entering the picture, as driven by whole research fields like real-time systems, cyber-physical systems, and autonomic computing. In summary, increasing complexity is implied in the functional and nonfunctional goals and requirements of future-generation systems, and this demands for theories, tools, and methods able to provide formal guarantees and properties of correctness and/or the ability to restore correct states if temporary failures are tolerated. Assessment of these guarantees cannot be limited to an isolated testing phase but should instead permeate the whole software lifecycle, from early detection of potential bugs, dodgy code, and known antipatterns down to monitoring the status of the runtime system.

To address the aforementioned challenges, this Special Issue welcomes original, high-quality research work on distributed systems that help to promote their quality and mitigate risks in their operation. These might include theories, architectures, approaches, methods, techniques, and tools addressing code quality assurance, testing, verification, monitoring, security audits, correctness-by-construction, and self-approaches.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

- Language-based approaches for distributed systems architecture

- Monitoring of distributed systems

- Runtime verification of distributed systems

- Testing of distributed systems

- Quality assurance of distributed systems

- Self-reconfiguration of distributed systems

- Self-repair of distributed systems

- Model checking for distributed systems

- Machine learning for verification and validation of distributed systems

- Reliability in cyber-physical systems

- Graceful degradation of distributed systems

- Flexible or dynamic deployment of distributed systems

- Architectural description languages and verification of architectural properties

- Correct-by-construction distributed systems

- Resilient distributed systems

- Dependable distributed systems

- DevOps techniques for distributed systems


Please feel free to contact the Guest Editors for any inquiries about the relevance of prospective manuscripts to the suggested topics in this call for papers.

Dr. Roberto Casadei
Dr. Danilo Pianini
Guest Editors