Remote handling (RH) is a key technology in the ITER fusion reactor. The controller systems used for performing mission-critical RH operations need to be dependable, as the fundamental requirement for the ITER RH system is a fail-safe and recoverable design. Additional design challenges include interoperability with systems and platform independence during ITER life cycle. Contributions are especially needed for development of cost-effective systems engineering (SE) practices and guidelines for fault-tolerant implementation. This paper addresses the issues by presenting a survey of industrial best practices and different fault prevention, tolerance, removal and forecasting methods. Based on the results, key findings to achieve dependable and cost efficient design include development a SE framework that supports reuse of components, models and analysis results; non-redundant fault tolerance; and use of commercial off-the-shelf hardware, operating systems and communication middleware.