Strategic directions in real-time and embedded systems

Abstract

Real-time computing is an enabling technology for many important application areas, including process control, nuclear power plants, agile manufacturing, intelligent vehicle highway systems, avionics, air-traffic control, telecommunications (the information superhighway), multimedia, real-time simulation, virtual reality, medical applications (e.g., telemedicine and intensive-care monitoring), and defense applications (e.g., command, control and communications). In particular, almost all safety-critical systems and many embedded computer systems are real-time systems. Further, realtime technology is becoming increasingly 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 distributed real-time, and multimedia systems. For each of these, research is required in the areas of system evolution, composibility, software engineering, the science of performance guarantees, reliability and formal verification, general system issues, programming languages, and education. Economic and safety considerations, as well as the special problems that timing constraints cause, must be taken into account in the solutions. In Section 2, several examples of realtime systems, their corresponding importance, and several examples of research success are presented. In Section 3 key future challenges and research related to strategic directions are highlighted. A vision of the field for the next ten years is presented in Section 4. Section 5 summarizes the paper.