Guest Editors’ Introduction

Abstract

Through decennia, computers have became smaller, faster, more affordable and reliable. Besides the “number-crunching” applications they found their use and eventually became indispensable in the control of technical processes. Generally, such computers are embedded in, i.e. become a part of, such systems. Their operation mode is called “real-time”; its most common definition is that they must be permanently ready to react to requests from the environment within a predefined time frame. Failure to meet that requirement can result in degraded performance (soft real-time) or system failure (hard real-time) with the same consequences as in the case of a functional error.