Call for papers: "Critical and Real-time Cyber-Physical Systems"

For a special issue of the International Journal of Embedded Systems.

Critical and real-time embedded systems integrate the modelling, design and analysis of hardware, software and communication systems that are deeply integrated with physical processes and with strict time and other requirements. These systems have special features that differentiate them from regular computer systems: (1) they are closely integrated into physical systems; (2) software is normally embedded in hardware with limited resources; (3) the system is distributed and in a large scale; (4) they must be adaptable and reconfigurable; (5) and must be dependable, secure and reliable.

Some critical embedded systems have even more strict constraints of resources and reliability, e.g. systems used in operating rooms for surgeries assisted by robots or for the controlling of electric power grids (smart grids) and unmanned vehicles. The development of such systems that attend these features, mainly through the fact of being large scale and the necessity of adaptability and reliability, is the main challenge addressed by this special issue.

In addition, critical and real-time embedded systems are required to be dependable, secure, reliable, adaptable and reconfigurable. Adaptability is a key feature, as it allows the system its own configuration to bring about more security, reliability and dependability. One special case of such systems are autonomous computing systems, which refer to systems able to self-manage features to provide adaptation and awareness. Modelling and simulation are listed among the research challenges bound to those systems.

Being reliable and fault tolerant is another feature common to critical and real-time systems which could be listed as another challenge of this project. A system is considered to be fault tolerant if it does not fail despite the presence of faults. The most common way to have a fault-tolerant system is by adding redundancy that can be achieved at hardware, software and network levels.

The main focus of this special issue is to discuss and present state of the art concerning practices and tools for the development of adaptable and reliable systems ready to be embedded into critical and real-time systems.

The issue will carry revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers presented at the III Brazilian Symposium on Computer Systems Engineering (SBESC 2014), but we also strongly encourage researchers unable to participate in the conference to submit articles for this call.

Suitable topics include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Modelling, design and simulation of critical and real-time systems
• Embedded systems in critical and real-time systems
• Networks, protocols and communication related to critical and real-time systems
• Distributed computing for support to critical and real-time systems
• Adaptable and reconfigurable systems and architectures in critical and real-time systems
• Fault tolerance in critical and real-time systems
• Harvesting energy and power consuption techniques in critical and real-time systems
• Applications: smart grids, smart cities, robotics, unmanned vehicles, etc.
• Autonomous computing systems in critical and real-time systems

Important Dates
Submission deadline: 10 March, 2015
Reviews results due: 8 July, 2015
Final version deadline: 8 August, 2015