Dependable and Failure-Tolerant Systems 2026DependSys 2026

Welcome to the second annual Dependable Systems and Failure Tolerance Workshop, to be held in conjunction with the IEEE Space Computing Conference (SCC). The goal of the workshop is to bring together the NASA avionics community, industry, and academia to share new techniques for increasing the resilience of spacecraft and other safety-critical systems, as well as to discuss some of the most significant challenges facing the discipline. The overall theme of this year’s workshop is “how do we leverage existing standards to achieve the ambitious goals and accelerated timelines set by NASA leadership and the aerospace industry for future missions?"

The workshop will take place over two days. Both will consist of a variety of invited talks, as well as an interactive discussion/activity. The first day will be used for general topics related to designing systems for dependability and failure tolerance. This includes presentations on new Byzantine fault-tolerant architectural techniques and the use of formal methods for assurance. The second day will be focused entirely on Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN). A variety of speakers will discuss their use of TSN for crewed or robotic spaceflight missions, as well as issues they have faced (e.g., with standards gaps, HW availability).

The tentative schedule of the workshop is below. It will be updated as new information is available.

Day 1 - Date TBD

Day 2 - Date TBD

DMS-R: ESA’s fault-tolerant flight computer used in ISS’ Zvezda module