Application Design Issues

This chapter discusses some crucial issues related to the design and the development of complex real-time applications requiring sensory acquisition, control, and actuation of mechanical components. The aim of this part is to give a precise characterization of control applications, so that theory developed for real-time computing and scheduling algorithms can be practically used in this field to make complex control systems more reliable. In fact, a precise observation of the timing constraints specified in the control loops and in the sensory acquisition processes is a necessary condition for guaranteeing a stable behavior of the controlled system, as well as a predictable performance.