The ever decreasing price/performance ratio of microcontrollers makes it economically attractive to replace more and more conventional mechanical or electronic control systems within many products by embedded real-time computer systems. An embedded real-time computer system is always part of a well-specified larger system, which we call an intelligent product. Although most intelligent products start out as stand-alone units, many of them are required to interact with other systems at a later stage. At present, many industries are in the middle of this transition from stand-alone products to networked embedded systems. This transition requires reflection and architecting: the complexity of the evolving distributed artifact can only be controlled if careful planning and principled design methods replace the ad-hoc engineering of the first version of many standalone embedded products.
Design Methods and Applications for Distributed Embedded Systems documents recent approaches and results presented at the IFIP TC10 Working Conference on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2004), which was held in August 2004 as a co-located conference of the 18th IFIP World Computer Congress in Toulouse, France, and sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP).
The topics which have been chosen for this working conference are very timely: model-based design methods, design space exploration, design methodologies and user interfaces, networks and communication, scheduling and resource management, fault detection and fault tolerance, and verification and analysis. These topics are supplemented by several hardware and application oriented papers.
