"This book is a comprehensive text for the design of safety critical, hard real-time embedded systems. It offers a splendid example for the balanced, integrated treatment of systems and software engineering, helping readers tackle the hardest problems of advanced real-time system design, such as determinism, compositionality, timing and fault management. This book is an essential reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in a wide range of disciplines impacted by embedded computing and software. Its conceptual clarity, the style of explanations and the examples make the abstract concepts accessible for a wide audience." Janos Sztipanovits, Director E. Bronson Ingram Distinguished Professor of Engineering Institute for Software Integrated Systems Vanderbilt University Real-Time Systems focuses on hard real-time systems, which are computing systems that must meet their temporal specification in all anticipated load and fault scenarios. The book stresses the system aspects of distributed real- time applications, treating the issues of real-time, distribution and fault- tolerance from an integral point of view. A unique cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts between the academic and industrial worlds has led to the inclusion of many insightful examples from industry to explain the fundamental scientific concepts in a real-world setting. Compared to the Second