Real-Time Software Design for Safety- and Mission-Critical Systems with High Dependability

For open distributed and embedded systems, the end-to-end real-time quality of service (QoS) is crucial since they are usually safety- and mission-critical applications. Due to the constrained system resources such as computing capacity and network bandwidth, an intermediate software layer called middleware is being adopted to manage the limited system resources in an adaptive fashion in order to meet the QoS demands under the uncertain and dynamic operating environment. In this paper, a distributed and embedded real-time control architecture with middleware support for software-intensive systems is discussed, which aims to achieve the end-to-end QoS-ensured control performance in a wide range of real-world operation scenarios. The adaptive resource management is detailed, which is implemented based on the feedback control mechanism. A real-world application for distributed and embedded vibration mitigation is also discussed.