Engineering of distributed control systems

The Joint Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems was held in Santa Barbara, April 1–3, 1997 as part of the 9th IEEE International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS). The workshop combined the 5th International Workshop on Parallel and Distributed Real-Time Systems (WPDRTS) and the 3rd Workshop on Object-Oriented Real-Time Systems (OORTS). The meeting brought together researchers from different  communities  to address issues of mutual interest since it has become evident that the existing methods employed by these different communities have been unable to solve all the problems associated with the construction of distributed and dependable real-time systems. An example is the domain of object-oriented real-time systems, that has been explicitly addressed at the workshop by members of several different  communities . The event clearly showed that various problems can only be solved if the many relevant disciplines join their forces in an systems engineering approach towards system construction. To disperse the findings reported at the workshop, several papers from the workshop's proceedings were selected for enhancement and subsequent inclusion in this special issue. These papers give a good overview about the various issues a system engineer of a complex distributed real-time system is confronted with: Requirements engineering and architecting (H. Gomaa), formal specification and validation of real-time systems (J. Hooman and O. van Roosmalen as well as S. Yamane), formal specification and verification of hybrid systems (R. Huuck, Y. Lakhnech, L. Urbina, S. Engell, S. Kowalewski and J. Preussig), program analysis (J. Gustafsson and A. Ermedahl), distributed real-time scheduling (G. Manimaran, M. Shashidhar, Anand Manikutty and C. Siva Ram Murthy), single-processor real- time scheduling (E. A. de Kock, E. H. L. Aarts and G. Essink) and real-time operating systems (A. Miyoshi and H. Tokuda). The guest editors would like to express their gratitude to the authors and the reviewers. We would also like to thank Eui-nam Huh whose help in the editorial process was invaluable. Lonnie R. Welch University of Texas at Arlington welch@ohio.uta.edu Dieter K. Hammer Eindhoven University of Technology hammer@win.tue.nl General Co-Chairs of WPDRTS'97