Establishing cost and resource efficient dependability through means of adaptivity in safety-critical distributed embedded systems is a strenuous endeavour, as the varying requirements on resilience, control and efficiency across domains prohibits a single solution to suit all needs. To assist the process of determining a safe and efficient system architecture with satisfactory precision, this work exemplifies the importance of differentiation by only addressing distributed embedded systems

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... perform multiple functions with alternating levels of criticality. Further, they do not require full fail-operational behaviour, thus allowing to sacrifice less important functions in the pursuit of preserving safety. Herein, a dynamic instantiation and graceful degradation strategy is developed to subsequently study its effect on cost when implemented in conjunction with execute-in-place (NOR-flash) or block-addressable (NAND-flash) memory concepts. Even though NOR-flash is generally considered to be a better candidate for such systems, this qualitative research produces evidence that NAND-flash memory concepts are likely to financially outperform traditional architectures when considering adaptivity.