Distributed real-time embedded systems: Recent advances, future trends and their impact on manufacturing plant control

Real-time and embedded systems have historically been small scale. However, advances in microelectronics and software now allow embedded systems to be composed of a large set of processing elements, and the trend is towards significant enhanced functionality, complexity, and scalability, since those systems are increasingly being connected by wired and wireless networks to create large-scale distributed real-time embedded systems (DRES). Such embedded computing and information technologies have become at the same time an enabler for future manufacturing enterprises as well as a transformer of organizations and markets. This paper discusses opportunities for using recent advances in the DRES area in the deployment of intelligent, adaptive, and reconfigurable manufacturing plant control architectures.