Computers are now available anytime, anywhere, by different means, and are distributed unobtrusively throughout everyday environments in which physical objects/artifacts embedded with invisible computers are sensible and networked locally and globally. “Computer systems" are often interpreted broadly that include system architectures, operating systems, parallel and distributed systems, and computer networks. Such computing systems open tremendous opportunities to provide numerous novel services/applications in both real world and cyber spaces, and exist ubiquitously in our daily life, working, learning, traveling, entertainment, medicine, etc. Although it is yet unclear what exactly the real cyber-physical integrated worlds would be, there is no doubt that they must be “dependable”.

Increasingly, researchers, practitioners, academics, and organizations are developing or procuring sophisticated computer systems on whose “dependability” of services they need to place great confidence. Future systems need to close the dependability gap in face of challenges in different circumstances. The emphasis will be on differing properties of such services, e.g., continuity, effective performance, real-time responsiveness, ability to overcome data fault/corruption/anomaly, ability to avoid catastrophic failures, prevention of deliberate privacy intrusions, reliability/availability/sustainability/adaptability/security/safety, and so on. While information society, commercial and scientific companies and industries share the need for massive throughput, “dependability” of service becomes a big concern.

The focus of this special issue is to present recent advances, original ideas, techniques, algorithms, and the like belonging to a myriad of research areas in parallel and distributed systems and applications, with the final goal of sharing their specific challenges and solutions for “dependability.”

Topics of Interest:

Any topic related to dependability issues will be considered. All aspects of design, theory and realization are of interest. The scope and interest for the special issue include, but are not limited to, the following:

Architecture, analysis, and design for parallel and distributed system dependability
Dependability issues in sensor, cloud, and big data systems and applications
Dependability issues in virtualization, real-time systems, multi-core systems, and datacenter systems
Dependability in distributed scheduling and resource management, database and transaction processing
Dependability issues in autonomic computing, Biocomputing, Quantum computing, and so on
Dependability in mobile computing, detection and tracking, activity-monitoring applications
Anomaly detection and protection, self-healing, self-protecting, and fault-tolerance in parallel and distributed systems
Security, safety, availability/reliability issues in distributed cyber-physical systems and applications (e.g. aerospace, industrial, transportation, smart grid, healthcare, telemetry monitoring, robotic, RFID, crowdsensing)
Software and hardware reliability, testing, verification and validation
Dependability measurement, modelling, evaluation, and tools for parallel and distributed systems
Submission Format and Guideline

All submitted papers must be written in clear, concise, well-organized, and grammatical English, and contain only original work, which has not been published by or is currently under review for any other journal or conference. Each paper should be accompanied by a cover letter outlining the basic findings of the paper and their significance.

Review process:

As a refereed publication, all papers submitted to this SI of Information Sciences must be refereed and are not guaranteed acceptance. The majority of papers that finally appear in the issue will likely be the result of the special issue’ solicitation. To specify this, the following four main criteria would be considered:

relevance to significant areas of research or practice is high;
the level of general interest is high;
the paper must have new contributions in its area (and not exceeding 30% of overlapping with other paper);
the presentation is effective.
Few papers excel in all four, but a substandard level in any is sufficient grounds for rejection. This means that papers that may well be in other journals may not be accepted to Information Sciences. To ensure that authors feel comfortable submitting despite these high standards, we aim for a two-step review process. One of the guest editors will do a Quick Review (i.e., first-roundpass), which is a quick scan of the paper to decide whether it meets these criteria, even assuming that all the results are correct as stated. If the paper does not seem to meet certain criteria, the early rejections would be notified. If it seems that the paper might satisfy these criteria, the paper will go through a rigorous peer-review process. A list of three international reviewers/experts from the respective research areas of the submitted papers will be invited to review the paper.

Submission Guidelines:

All manuscripts and any supplementary material should be submitted electronically (in PDF format) through Elsevier Editorial System (EES) at http://ees.elsevier.com/ins. The authors must select as “SI: Dependability in PDSA” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process.

A detailed submission guideline is available as “Guide to Authors” at: http://www.elsevier.com/journals/information-sciences/0020-0255/guide-for-authors.

Important Dates

Manuscript due: Nov. 15, 2015

First-roundpass notification (for a rejected paper): Nov. 30, 2015

Review result notification: April 1, 2016

Acceptance/rejection notification: Jun 1, 2016

Anticipated publication: 2017

Guest Editors

Md Zakirul Alam Bhuiyan*

School of Information Science and Engineering, Central South University, China, and Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, USA. Email: zakirulalam@gmail.com

Sy-Yen Kuo, College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, National Taiwan University, Taiwan. Email: sykuo@cc.ee.ntu.edu.tw

Jie Wu, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Temple University, USA. Email: jiewu@temple.edu

*Managing Editor