Middleware R&D Challenges for Distributed Real-time and Embedded Systems Douglas C. Schmidt and Aniruddha Gokhale Electrical Engineering & Computer Science Department Vanderbilt University Nashville, TN 37203, USA {d.schmidt,a.gokhale}@vanderbilt.edu Richard E. Schantz and Joseph P. Loyall BBN Technologies 10 Moulton Street Cambridge, MA 02138, USA {schantz, jloyall}@bbn.com the next-generation of open DRE systems, which evolve more rapidly and must collaborate with multiple remote sensors, provide on-demand browsing and actuation capabilities for human operators, and respond flexibly to unanticipated situational factors that arise at run-time. Many of the most challenging next-generation DRE systems will operate in large-scale DRE configurations that take input from large numbers of remote sensors and provide geographically dispersed operators with the ability to interact with the collected information and to control remote effectors. In circumstances where the presence of humans in the loop is too expensive or their responses are too slow, these systems must respond autonomously and flexibly to unanticipated combinations of events at run-time. Moreover, these systems are increasingly being networked to form long-lived systems of systems that must run unobtrusively and largely autonomously, shielding operators from unnecessary details, while simultaneously communicating and responding to mission-critical information at heretofore infeasible rates. Examples of
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