Description

At the dawn of the 21st century and the information age, communication and c- puting power are becoming ever increasingly available, virtually pervading almost every aspect of modern socio-economical interactions. Consequently, the potential for realizing a signi?cantly greater number of technology-mediated activities has emerged. Indeed, many of our modern activity ?elds are heavily dependant upon various underlying systems and software-intensive platforms. Such technologies are commonly used in everyday activities such as commuting, traf?c control and m- agement, mobile computing, navigation, mobile communication. Thus, the correct function of the forenamed computing systems becomes a major concern. This is all the more important since, in spite of the numerous updates, patches and ?rmware revisions being constantly issued, newly discovered logical bugs in a wide range of modern software platforms (e. g., operating systems) and software-intensive systems (e. g., embedded systems) are just as frequently being reported. In addition, many of today's products and services are presently being deployed in a highly competitive environment wherein a product or service is succeeding in most of the cases thanks to its quality to price ratio for a given set of features. Accordingly, a number of critical aspects have to be considered, such as the ab- ity to pack as many features as needed in a given product or service while c- currently maintaining high quality, reasonable price, and short time -to- market.