Nowadays, distributed architectures are the base of many manufacturing systems. Some aspects like fault-tolerance, system validation and design process are very important in the development of these systems. In this paper we study the dependability of three different architectures of a distributed system, and we show the development of both physical and logical fault injectors and the implementation of local performance monitors. We also study the impact of checkpointing mechanisms on the system performance in a control system based on a CAN network. Finally we propose a distributed system design methodology based on codesign.