ABSTRACT
Preface As is the case with many disciplines, availability, reliability, maintainability, and supportability are all related to dependability. Dependability is the ability to deliver a system or service that can be trusted. It is a collective term used to describe performance and its influencing factors: availability performance, reliability performance, maintainability performance, and maintenance support performance. Thus, dependability is a system property that integrates all of these disciplines. None can be treated as stand-alone. For this reason, availability, reliability, maintainability, supportability, and all of the related disciplines should be incorporated into an overall systems engineering approach.
