DECOS methodically targets, investigates, and develops approaches to significantly alleviate the identified five key obstacles - Electronic Hardware Cost, Diagnosis and Maintenance, Dependability, Development Cost, Intellectual Property (IP) Protection - to the deployment of advanced electronic functions in embedded systems. The intent is to provide an integrated distributed execution platform and a set of pre-validated hardware components and software modules and tools for the design of dependable embedded systems. Generic design solutions for integrated dependable systems will be developed such that the invariance of the design strategies and technology neutral interfaces are considered upfront as a design objective. System design approaches that are applicable to diverse application domains will be considered. DECOS targets automotive, aerospace, and control applications.