Safety-, mission-, and business-critical systems must be highly reliable and retain that reliability as it evolves without incurring prohibitive costs. They address scenarios that may result in human, business, or environmental losses. Examples of those systems include aircraft, automotive systems, nuclear power plants, spacecraft, bank accounting systems, and stock-trading systems, among others.

The Fault-Tolerant Systems research group, STF, at the ITACA Institute, has been working for more than 40 years on the development of techniques and tools for the robustness assessment, the provision and deployment of fault tolerance mechanisms, and the definition and implementation of dependability benchmarking procedures of critical systems. The STF group consists of university staff and contract researchers, primarily with a background in computer engineering. Currently, 8 people work full-time at the group.

The STF group conducts its activity within local, national, and European research projects funded by competitive programmes.