Guest Editors' Introduction: Reliability and Safety of Real-Time Systems

Not a day goes by that the general public does not come into contact with a real-time system. As their numbers and importance grow, so do the stakes for software developers. A failure in a critical application may result in great financial loss-or even loss of life. More effort must be expended to analyze the reliability and safety of such systems. Analysis of hardware components in critical applications has matured over the years and commonly followed techniques have emerged. However, methods and techniques for analyzing the reliability and safety of the software part of critical applications are relatively new and still maturing. Yet the vulnerability of the system to software failures is on the rise and may (and in some cases does) exceed hardware failures. Software is not only becoming more prevalent in real-time systems, it is becoming a larger part of real-time systems, in the sense that the amount of effort expended in designing and implementing the software is a larger proportion of the total expended effort. >