In this paper, we study the reliable decentralized supervisory control of discrete event systems (DESs) under the general architecture, in which the decision for controllable events employed is a combination of the conjunctive fusion and disjunctive fusion rules. For a plant equipped with n local supervisors, the notion of k-reliable (1 k n) decentralized supervisor is formalized and investigated here. By k-reliable decentralized supervisor, we mean that the specification can be achieved exactly even under possible failures of any no more than n - k local supervisors. It is worth noting that the standard decentralized supervisory control problem in the general architecture [14] can be regarded as a special case of k-reliable decentralized supervisory control with k = n. The main contributions of the paper lie on the proposed necessary and sufficient conditions for the existences of kreliable decentralized supervisor and nonblocking k-reliable decentralized supervisor in the context o...