Special issue on scheduling and timing analysis for advanced real-time systems
Real-time embedded systems such as those found in automotive, aerospace, and other domains are characterised not only by the need for functional correctness, but also the need for temporal or timing correctness. Typically they continually monitor and respond to stimuli from the environment and the physical systems that they control. In order for such systems to behave correctly, they must not only execute the correct computations, but also do so within predefined time constraints or deadlines on the elapsed time between a stimuli and the corresponding response. Advances in software development methods, hardware technology, and the need to focus on energy efficiency pose significant challenges to the analysis of the overall timing behaviour of real-time systems. With hardware technology continuing to scale through the sub-micron to the deep sub-micron domain (e.g. 35–10nm) factors such as the increased probability of circuit failure causing permanent faults, and increased power consumption and problems of heat dissipation come to the fore. Further, increasing hardware capability has enabled significant increases in the volume and complexity of the software deployed in real-time applications; a trend that is set to continue. As a way of managing this complexity, software is often now produced via Model Based Design methods complemented by automatic code generation. Such an approach poses a severe challenge to the effectiveness of current worst-case execution time analysis techniques, but also opens up opportunities for tracking software