Special track on Dependable and Adaptive Distributed Systems: editorial message

Distributed systems, services and databases are at the core of the information society and increasingly pervade many aspects of our daily lives. While mobility and pervasiveness require support for systems that adapt themselves to changing environments, resources, and user needs, the middleware infrastructures become more and more heterogeneous and complex. This trend is further fueled by the emergence of service oriented computing. In addition, we can see an increasing demand for dependability and security of such systems, taking into account the software as well as the surrounding environment. This mismatch between increasing demand for dependability on one hand and a degradation of dependability caused by complexity, scale, and dynamics has recently been termed by Laprie as the "dependability gap".