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.

This Proceedings contains the papers presented at the IFAC Workshop on Real-Time Programming held in Spain. During these last twelve years, the Workshop on Real-Time Programming (WRTP) has developed as an excellent forum for presenting the most relevant advances in the field of real-time computing and exchanging information and experiences among the real-time community. Several of the most relevant people of this community have participated in the reviewing process that plays, every time, a more important role. This year, 48 papers from 16 different countries have been submitted to the Workshop. After the review process, 31 of them have been selected for presentation including 2 industrial papers. They cover topics of formal methods, scheduling, distributed systems, embedded systems, design techniques, applications, etc. Their discussion proved to be interesting and productive, and we are sure that it helped to throw light on some of the aspects of Real-Time Programming. WRTP 2000 was organised in co-operation with another event related to the real-time field: the Workshop on Algorithms and Architecture for Real-Time Control (AARTC). Both Workshops were scheduled with a common day of joint activities. This experience increased the level of cooperation and information exchanging between this two research communities which have several aspects in common.

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.