State of the art review paper: advances in embedded hard real-time systems design

The most important and necessary properties of embedded real-time systems, and the ways to achieve them, are explored. The basic and most important domains of real-time systems design are dealt with, starting with the processor and system hardware architectures, over operating systems, tasking and scheduling, high-level real-time programming languages, worst case execution time and schedulability analysis, to application design engineering and safety critical applications. Common misconceptions which are still strongly present in the control systems design are identified, guidelines for the consistent implementation are proposed and sample solutions in certain areas are presented.