EMBEDDED CONTROL SYSTEMS: FROM DESIGN TO IMPLEMENTATION

Embedded systems are becoming more and more popular in a wide range of applications such as industrial control systems, avionics, health care, environment, security, mechanics. The development of the hardware and software for these systems require appropriate design, analysis and development tools. The underlying architecture also plays and important role. Special design related challenges come from the specialisation and customisation of target platforms in their use for embedded systems. The challenge is to maintain some degree of exibility to increase the reuse of hardware and software components.The use of many disciplines and the heterogeneity of applied technologies are the last but not the least important factors in making the design of embedded systems special. There are several cooperating areas of knowledge involved in the development of embedded systems, starting with requirements capture and leading to implementation, using tools and methods to ensure satisfactory levels of productivity and quality. Areas as modelling to organise and validate the system requirements, real-time to determine and analyse the critical or flexible temporal constraints, compilers and timing analysis to generate the code with the appropriate properties and to estimate execution time and energy, execution support to offer a execution platform and operating system with the needed services to guarantee the requirement fulfilment, networking to design of distributed co-operating embedded systems, and control to provide the techniques and methods to use embedded systems in the control industry. This paper analyses these areas showing the current trends and pointed out the main aspects that are recognised as important by scientific and experts of the field.