Real-Time Systems
One often neglected measure of robustness is the timeliness of
system operation. For some systems, a late result is worse than
no result at all. Not only does the late result contribute no value,
but its computation tied up resources which could have been used by
another computation to maximize the benefit to the system. Such
systems are called hard real-time systems
[1].
At the other extreme are the non-real-time systems in which
timeliness is not a concern. It is sufficient that the computation
returns a result. In between are soft real-time systems in
which a late result has varying levels of utility. All computations
can be classified somewhere on the continuum from non-real-time to
hard real-time.
While we are not currently studying real-time systems, we receive
frequent requests for these papers and hence make them available
here as a service to the computing community.
