4. Conclusion

Dependability, a generic term covering the reliability, maintainability, availability and safety of systems, is today a decisive factor in the choice of technological, economic and societal strategy for a project. It must be involved from the earliest stages of the system design process. Control systems are obviously no exception to this rule, and we have attempted to demonstrate an approach to taking this into account, enabling the safety performance of these systems to be assessed in a predictive way, so that they can be included in the decision-making criteria as early as possible. However, the growing complexity of these systems is constantly creating new problems that are difficult to solve. This is still an area of research, particularly in what specialists call dynamic reliability, where the time factor is omnipresent, through the evolution of system structure (reconfigurations, etc.),...