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This book collects the efforts developed by a series of researchers, presented at AMAST Workshops on Real-Time Systems. The authors whose papers were selected for this book are major players in this area, and they were given the opportunity to refine the text of their papers as a result of the lively discussions that took place during the workshops. The refining of the papers continued all through the editing process as well. The papers were carefully selected and revised by the editors and grouped into six parts debating subjects on the modeling and analysis, verification, synthesis, tools, and applications of real-time systems. The editors considered that these divisions made the book more coherent, and therefore, more readable. It is almost futile to say that there is a large amount of research and literature on the subject of real-time systems. The subject is of great importance and it is resuscitating large interest in the research community. Great efforts have been made towards a clear understanding of the nature, features and particularities of real-time systems. As a result, a series of approaches of the field problems have been attempted. The variety of the latter spans over a vast spectrum of theoretical frameworks, from finite state machines to mathematical models expressed in various versions of the lambda calculus | and so are also the practical methodologies that have resulted by applying the above. As real-time systems are, as the name shows, systems, a systemic approach is needed, which unfortunately is very difficult to set. The difficulty stems from the combination of processes, some modeled by a set of differential/difference equations, and others by logic statements and their computer control algorithms, which usually involve first-order and/or temporal logic statements. The above facts have led to an arabesque of |
