Background
International Journal of Performability Engineering (IJPE), in collaboration with the 6th International Conference on Dependable Systems and Their Applications (DSA – an IEEE technically sponsored conference), will have a special section focusing on innovative methodologies, techniques, tools, and management to produce dependable and trustworthy systems and their applications in a more cost-effective way. It provides a publication venue to bring together academic researchers, industry practitioners, and government policy and decision makers to exchange ideas and results, share experiences, and explore possible solutions to overcome current challenges.
In addition to an open call to the scientific community, we also welcome authors of papers with high quality that are recommended by the DSA program committee to submit their extended versions.

Topics of Interest
Submissions related to the following topics are encouraged. Others relevant to dependable systems and their applications are also welcome.
•  Algorithms, Architecture, Framework, Design Patterns and Maintenance for Dependable Systems and Software
•  Security, Threats, Privacy, Safety, and Risk Management
•  Dependability and Reliability Modeling and Measurement
•  Fault Tolerance, Survivability, Resilience, and Availability
•  Metrics, Measurement, and Quality Assessment
•  Requirements, Process, Standards, Productivity, and Project Management
•  Quality Assurance, Maintenance, and Reverse Engineering and Re-Engineering
•  Verification, Validation, Testing, Analysis, Debugging, Model Checking, and Program Repair
•  Formal Methods and Theories
•  Communication, Networking, Optimization, and Performance
•  Pervasive, Ubiquitous, Service-Oriented, and Clouding Computing
•  Collaborative, Distributed, Embedded, Real-Time, High Performance, Highly Dependable, Intelligent, Multimedia Systems
•  Big Data and Storage
•  Prognostics and Health Management
•  IoT, Supply Chain, Cyber-physical Systems, Industry 4.0, and Smart City
•  Empirical Studies, Benchmarking, and Industrial Best Practices
•  Applications, Tools, and Automation

Submission
We welcome high quality submissions that are original work, not published, and not currently submitted elsewhere. We also encourage extensions to conference papers, unless prohibited by copyright, if there is a significant difference in the technical content. Improvements such as adding a new case study or including a description of additional related studies do not satisfy this requirement. A description explaining the difference between the conference paper and the journal submission is required. The overlap between each submission and other articles, including the authors’ own papers and dissertations, should be less than 30%. Each submission must conform to the IJPE template which can be downloaded on the journal’s official website. Please submit your paper to the IJPE submission page.

Important Dates
•  November 15, 2019 Paper submission
•  December 20, 2019 First round notification
•  February 10, 2020 Second round notification
Papers accepted for this special section have already been published in the February 2020 issue.

Editor-in-Chief
•  Professor Steven Li, Western New England University, USA
•  Dr. Suprasad V. Amari, BAE Systems, USA
•  Professor Fevzi Belli, University of Paderborn, Germany

Guest Editors
•  Professor Franz Wotawa, Graz University of Technology, Austria
•  Professor Yun Lin, Harbin Engineering University, China
•  Professor Jian Dong, Harbin Institute of Technology, China [Detail] ...