These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 20th IFAC/IFIP Annual Workshop on Real Time Programming (WRTP '95) held in Florida, USA on 6-10 November 1995. The unifying theme of the Workshop was the problem presented by the designed construction and maintenance of complex computer systems which are important in sectors such as manufacturing, communications, defence, transportation, aerospace, hazardous environments, energy and health care. These systems frequently include distributed, heterogeneous networks and are constrained by requirements on performance, real time behaviour, fault tolerance, security, adaptability, development time and cost, long life concerns and other areas. The papers were grouped under various topics (complex and dependable real time systems, formal methods, languages, tools and environments, systems and software engineering, advanced applications such as imaging, database systems and heterogeneous systems) and reflect the desire to bring together industrial, academic and government experts from various disciplines and to promote long-term research, near-term effective complex systems requirements and promising tools.

Real-Time Systems in Mechatronic Applications brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Real-Time Systems in Mechatronic Applications serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

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.

Paperback. This volume contains the proceedings of the 21st IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Real Time Programming (WRTP'96) held in Gramado, Brazil on 4-6 November 1996. Over the years, this series of annual workshops has become an excellent forum for exchanging information on technological advances and practices in real time computing - a field that is rapidly becoming an essential enabling discipline in computer science and engineering.The technical programme of the workshop maintained the outstanding quality of the series and covered all the latest research and developments in scheduling, operating systems, communications, timing analysis, system development, databases, formal methods and applications. In addition to high quality papers, the programme featured three world class keynote speakers and some poster presentations. These proceedings, therefore, comprise 21 full papers, three keynote addresses and five short contributions.

The 1997 IFAC/IFIP Workshop on Real Time Programming represents the twenty-second meeting of the Workshop since 1971. It has been sponsored by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) and the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) since 1974. This year it was held in Lyon, France, and was organised by the Laboratoire d'ingeacute;nierie de l'informatique industrielle (L3i) de l'Institut National des Sciences Appliqueacute;es de Lyon (INSA Lyon). These proceedings comprise the 19 full papers (selected out of 35 submissions) presented at the workshop, the synthesis of the two forums, and the extended abstracts of the invited speaker. The Workshop provides an opportunity to assess the state of the art, to present new results, and to discuss possible lines of future developments. This year, a particular accent was given to Object-Oriented researches in the field of real time programming. It covered latest research and developments in architecture, object-oriented approach, timing analysis, scheduling and design plus a forum on Real Time Education.

Presents papers from a May 1999 symposium, in sections on analysis and design, middleware and operating systems, applications, tools and services, modeling and evaluation, object-oriented techniques for resource-constrained architectures, QoS assurance, software architecture, fault tolerance, and re