Real-time reconfiguration in complex embedded systems: A vision and its reality

Future networked embedded systems (NES) will be complex systems deeply integrated in the environment that they monitor. They will have to react to both user and environmental events, and this may require modifying their structure to handle the changing situations. For a number of domains, such adaptation will need to take place in real-time, introducing a hard problem that will require novel and paradigmatic solutions involving cross-domain knowledge. The ARTEMIS iLAND1 project focuses on time-deterministic reconfiguration in complex NES. The project contributions gather around the construction of a light-weight real-time middleware architecture and of the development the required processes and algorithms to support system reconfiguration in bounded-time with bounded-error. This paper presents the context of this challenging problem by describing the contributions and vision of the project and discussing a number of limitations found in current approaches. The paper also discusses the set of realistic bounds and assumptions in order to provide valid contributions to reconfiguration in its target application domains. A use case scenario that has already been implemented as a demonstrator is described in order to illustrate the validity of the presented approach.