The design of computer systems to be embedded in critical real-time applications is a complex task. Such systems must not only guarantee to meet hard real-time deadlines imposed by their physical environment, they must guarantee to do so dependably, despite both physical faults (in hardware) and design faults (in hardware or software). A fault-tolerance approach is mandatory for these guarantees to be commensurate with the safety and reliability requirements of many life- and mission-critical applications. This book explains the motivations and the results of a collaborative project', whose objective was to significantly decrease the lifecycle costs of such fault tolerant systems. The end-user companies participating in this project already deploy fault-tolerant systems in critical railway, space and nuclear-propulsion applications. However, these are proprietary systems whose architectures have been tailored to meet domain-specific requirements. This has led to very costly, inflexible, and often hardware-intensive solutions that, by the time they are developed, validated and certified for use in the field, can already be out-of-date in terms of their underlying hardware and software technology.

Delta-4 is a 5-nation, 13-partner project that has been investigating the achievement of dependability in open distributed systems, including real-time systems. This book describes the design and validation of the distributed fault-tolerant architecture developed within this project. The key features of the Delta-4 architecture are: (a) a distributed object-oriented application support environment; (b) built-in support for user-transparent fault tolerance; (c) use of multicast or group communication protocols; and (d) use of standard off the-shelf processors and standard local area network technology with minimum specialized hardware. The book is organized as follows: The first 3 chapters give an overview of the architecture's objectives and of the architecture itself, and compare the proposed solutions with other approaches. Chapters 4 to 12 give a more detailed insight into the Delta-4 architectural concepts. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to providing a firm set of general concepts and terminology regarding dependable and real-time computing. Chapter 6 is centred on fault-tolerance techniques based on distribution. The description of the architecture itself commences with a description of the Delta-4 application support environment (Deltase) in chapter 7. Two variants of the architecture - the Delta-4 Open System Architecture (OSA) and the Delta-4 Extra Performance Architecture (XPA) - are described respectively in chapters 8 and 9. Both variants of the architecture have a common underlying basis for dependable multicasting, i. e.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, Ada-Europe 2002, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2002. The 24 revised full papers presented together with four invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected for inclusion in the proceedings. The papers are organized in topical sections on embedded systems, case studies, real-time systems, high-integrity systems, Ada language issues, program analysis, tools, distributed systems, and libraries and APIs.

As software systems become ubiquitous, the issues of dependability become more and more critical. Given that solutions to these issues must be taken into account from the very beginning of the design process, it is appropriate that dependability is addressed at the architectural level. This book results from an effort to bring together the research communities of software architectures and dependability. Inspired by the ICSE 2003 Workshop on Software Architectures for Dependable Systems, the book focuses on topics relevant to improving the state of the art in architecting dependable systems. The 15 thoroughly reviewed papers originate partly from the workshop; others were solicited in order to achieve complete coverage of all relevant aspects. The papers are organized into topical sections on architectures for dependability, fault-tolerance in software architectures, dependability analysis in software architectures, and industrial experience.

st This volume contains the proceedings of two conferences held as part of the 21 IFIP World Computer Congress in Brisbane, Australia, 20–23 September 2010. th The first part of the book presents the proceedings of DIPES 2010, the 7 IFIP Conference on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems. The conference, int- duced in a separate preface by the Chairs, covers a range of topics from specification and design of embedded systems through to dependability and fault tolerance. rd The second part of the book contains the proceedings of BICC 2010, the 3 IFIP Conference on Biologically-Inspired Collaborative Computing. The conference is concerned with emerging techniques from research areas such as organic computing, autonomic computing and self-adaptive systems, where inspiraton for techniques - rives from exhibited behaviour in nature and biology. Such techniques require the use of research developed by the DIPES community in supporting collaboration over multiple systems. We hope that the combination of the two proceedings will add value for the reader and advance our related work.

Due to the decreasing production costs of IT systems, applications that had to be realised as expensive PCBs formerly, can now be realised as a system-on-chip. Furthermore, low cost broadband communication media for wide area communication as well as for the realisation of local distributed systems are available. Typically the market requires IT systems that realise a set of specific features for the end user in a given environment, so called embedded systems. Some examples for such embedded systems are control systems in cars, airplanes, houses or plants, information and communication devices like digital TV, mobile phones or autonomous systems like service- or edutainment robots. For the design of embedded systems the designer has to tackle three major aspects: The application itself including the man-machine interface, The (target) architecture of the system including all functional and non-functional constraints and, the design methodology including modelling, specification, synthesis, test and validation. The last two points are a major focus of this book. This book documents the high quality approaches and results that were presented at the International Workshop on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2000), which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), and organised by IFIP working groups WG10.3, WG10.4 and WG10.5. The workshop took place on October 18-19, 2000, in Schloß Eringerfeld near Paderborn, Germany. Architecture and Design of Distributed Embedded Systems is organised similar to the workshop. Chapters 1 and 4 (Methodology I and II) deal with different modelling and specification paradigms and the corresponding design methodologies. Generic system architectures for different classes of embedded systems are presented in Chapter 2. In Chapter 3 several design environments for the support of specific design methodologies are presented. Problems concerning test and validation are discussed in Chapter 5. The last two chapters include distribution and communication aspects (Chapter 6) and synthesis techniques for embedded systems (Chapter 7). This book is essential reading for computer science researchers and application developers.

A team of recognized experts leads the way to dependable computing systems With computers and networks pervading every aspect of daily life, there is an ever-growing demand for dependability. In this unique resource, researchers and organizations will find the tools needed to identify and engage state-of-the-art approaches used for the specification, design, and assessment of dependable computer systems. The first part of the book addresses models and paradigms of dependable computing, and the second part deals with enabling technologies and applications. Tough issues in creating dependable computing systems are also tackled, including: * Verification techniques * Model-based evaluation * Adjudication and data fusion * Robust communications primitives * Fault tolerance * Middleware * Grid security * Dependability in IBM mainframes * Embedded software * Real-time systems Each chapter of this contributed work has been authored by a recognized expert. This is an excellent textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate students in electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science, as well as a must-have reference that will help engineers, programmers, and technologists develop systems that are secure and reliable.