Strategic Directions in Real-time and Embedded Systems

Strategic Directions in Real-Time and Embedded Systems JOHN A.STANKOVIC ET AL.1

Department of Computer Science,University of Virginia,Charlottesville,VA22903

͗stankovic@͘

1.INTRODUCTION

Real-time computing is an enabling tech-nology for many important application ar-eas,including process control,nuclear power plants,agile manufacturing,intel-ligent vehicle highway systems,avionics, air-traffic control,telecommunications (the information superhighway),multi-media,real-time simulation,virtual re-ality,medical applications(e.g.,telemedi-cine and intensive-care monitoring),and defense applications(e.g.,command, control and communications).In partic-ular,almost all safety-critical systems and many embedded computer systems are real-time systems.Further,real-time technology is becoming increas-ingly important and pervasive, e.g., more and more infrastructure of the world depends on it.

Strategic directions for research in real-time computing involve addressing new types of real-time systems including open real-time systems,globally distrib-uted real-time,and multimedia systems. For each of these,research is required in the areas of system evolution,composibil-ity,software engineering,the science of performance guarantees,reliability and formal verification,general system is-sues,programming languages,and edu-cation.Economic and safety consider-ations,as well as the special problems that timing constraints cause,must be taken into account in the solutions.

In Section2,several examples of real-time systems,their corresponding im-portance,and several examples of re-search success are presented.In Section 3key future challenges and research related to strategic directions are high-lighted.A vision of the field for the next ten years is presented in Section4.Sec-tion5summarizes the paper.

2.EXAMPLES OF REAL-TIME SYSTEMS

AND RESEARCH SUCCESSES

A real-time system is one in which the correctness of the system depends not only on the logical results,but also on the time at which the results are pro-duced.Many real-time systems are em-bedded systems,i.e.,they are compo-nents of a larger system.If incorrect operation of a system can lead to loss of life or other catastrophes,it is called a safety-critical system—air-traffic con-trol,for instance.An air-traffic control system must continuously manage mas-sive amounts of data.Unlike some large data-management systems,such as air-line reservations,air-traffic control data is constantly changing and has ex-tremely high value(related to public safety)for very short amounts of time (response-time requirements vary from a few milliseconds for radar data to several seconds for flight control infor-mation).At completion,the new U.S.

1Contributors to this article include Alan Burns,

Kevin Jeffay,Mike Jones,Gary Koob,Insup Lee,

John Lehoczky,Jane Liu,Al Mok,Krithi Ramam-

ritham,Jim Ready,Lui Sha,and Andre van Til-

borg.

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