This book is a rich text for introducing diverse aspects of real-time systems including architecture, specification and verification, scheduling and real world applications. It is useful for advanced graduate students and researchers in a wide range of disciplines impacted by embedded computing and software. Since the book covers the most recent advances in real-time systems and communications networks, it serves as a vehicle for technology transition within the real-time systems community of systems architects, designers, technologists, and system analysts. Real-time applications are used in daily operations, such as engine and break mechanisms in cars, traffic light and air-traffic control and heart beat and blood pressure monitoring. This book includes 15 chapters arranged in 4 sections, Architecture (chapters 1-4), Specification and Verification (chapters 5-6), Scheduling (chapters 7-9) and Real word applications (chapters 10-15).

This updated edition offers an indispensable exposition on real-time computing, with particular emphasis on predictable scheduling algorithms. It introduces the fundamental concepts of real-time computing, demonstrates the most significant results in the field, and provides the essential methodologies for designing predictable computing systems used to support time-critical control applications. Along with an in-depth guide to the available approaches for the implementation and analysis of real-time applications, this revised edition contains a close examination of recent developments in real-time systems, including limited preemptive scheduling, resource reservation techniques, overload handling algorithms, and adaptive scheduling techniques. This volume serves as a fundamental advanced-level textbook. Each chapter provides basic concepts, which are followed by algorithms, illustrated with concrete examples, figures and tables. Exercises and solutions are provided to enhance self-study, making this an excellent reference for those interested in real-time computing for designing and/or developing predictable control applications.

The IFIP TC-10 Working Conference on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2004) brings together experts from industry and academia to discuss recent developments in this important and growing field in the splendid city of Toulouse, France. The ever decreasing price/performance ratio of microcontrollers makes it economically attractive to replace more and more conventional mechanical or electronic control systems within many products by embedded real-time computer systems. An embedded real-time computer system is always part of a well-specified larger system, which we call an intelligent product. Although most intelligent products start out as stand-alone units, many of them are required to interact with other systems at a later stage. At present, many industries are in the middle of this transition from stand-alone products to networked embedded systems. This transition requires reflection and architecting: The complexity of the evolving distributed artifact can only be controlled, if careful planning and principled design methods replace the - hoc engineering of the first version of many standalone embedded products.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP International Conference on Network and Parallel Computing, NPC 2007. It covers network applications: cluster and grid computing, peer-to-peer computing; network technologies: network algorithms, network reliability and dependability; network and parallel architectures: multicore design issues, performance modeling and evaluation; and parallel and distributed software: data mining, parallel programming tools and compilers.