The market is steadily growing for embedded systems which are IT systems that realize a set of specific features for the end user in a given environment. Some examples are control systems in cars, airplanes or houses, information and communication devices such as digital TV and mobile phones, and autonomous systems such as service or edutainment robots. Due to steady improvements of production processes, each of those applications is now realized as a system-on-chip. Furthermore, on the hardware side, low-cost broadband communication media are the technological components essential in the realization of distributed systems. In order to ease the use of the variety of communication systems, middleware solutions for embedded systems are emerging. The verification of system correctness during the entire design cycle and the guarantee of non-functional requirements such as real-time support or dependability requirements play a major role for such distributed solutions and hence, are the focus of this book.
This book documents recent approaches and results presented at the Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2002) stream of the 17th World Computer Congress, which was sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada in August 2002. This TC 10 Stream was organized by the IFIP WG 10.5 Special Interest Group on Embedded Systems (SIG-ES) in co-operation with WG 10.3 and WG 10.4.