Hands on Dependability Economics

Contemporary societies (from individuals to organizations) depend on services delivered by systems to achieve individual goals, meaning that a system must have engineered and guaranteed dependability, regardless of continuous, rapid and unpredictable technological and context changes. The simplest questions that brought out in the surface are to understand on how to evaluate and how much (money) should we spend on dependability. Dependability risk management is an effective process that with simplicity can determine the likelihood of an accident and the severities of the consequences. On the other hand, we also need quantitative methods, in order to assess the cost of the various measures which can be taken to reduce the dependability risk. In this paper, we survey quantitative methods that can play an important role in Dependability Economics. These methods aim in providing estimations for the economic consequences of lowering dependability levels and the costs to implement dependability.