Special issue on embedded real-time applications

As computing platforms are becoming more powerful and energy efficient, embedded real-time systems are spreading in emerging application domains, from small autonomous robots to unmanned aerial vehicles, medical wearable devices, and intelligent sensors and actuators for the Internet of Things. Many of such systems are required to interact with the surrounding environment, reacting to events within stringent deadlines, also guaranteeing security and safety features. In addition, the heavy use of machine learning algorithms for perception and control tasks is increasing the complexity of the software architecture, which is often organized in modular components with different levels of criticality. One common way to manage such a software complexity is to partition the computational resources available on the platform into a set of execution domains coordinated by a hypervisor, which encapsulates each software component into a virtual machine, while guaranteeing safety, security, and predictability properties. The four papers collected in this special issue address some of the crucial topics highlighted above, presenting them in different application contexts. The articles are extended versions of papers carefully selected over twenty-four works presented at the 7th Italian Workshop on Embedded Systems (IWES 2022), held at Politecnico di Bari, Bari, Italy, on September 22-23 of 2022, and went through a rigorous and independent review process, being evaluated by at least three expert reviewers in the subject area of each article.