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Real-time embedded software today is commonly built using programming abstractions with little or no temporal semantics. This paper addresses this problem by presenting a programming model called PTIDES that serves as a coordination language for model-based design of distributed real-time embedded systems. Specifically, the paper describes the principles of PTIDES, which leverages network time synchronization to provide a determinate distributed real-time semantics. We show how PTIDES can function as a coordination language, orchestrating components that may be designed and specified using different formalisms. We show the use of this environment in the design of interesting and practical cyber-physical systems, such as a power plant control system.

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The Internet of Things leverages Internet technology in cyber-physical systems (CPSs), but the protocols and principles of the Internet were designed for interacting with information systems, not cyberphysical systems. For one, timeliness is not a factor in any widespread Internet technology, with qualityof-service features having been routinely omitted for decades. In addition, for things, safety, freedom from physical harm, is even more important than information security, the focus on the Internet. Nevertheless, properties of the Internet are valuable in CPSs, including a global namespace, reliable (eventual) delivery of messages, end-to-end security through asymmetric encryption, certificate-based authentication, and the ability to aggregate data from a multiplicity of sources in the cloud. This paper discusses and surveys architectural approaches, communication protocols, and programming models that promise to bridge the gap, enabling the use of the Internet technologies even in safety-critical, cyber-physical applications such as factory automation and transportation. Specifically, we argue that smart gateways hosted on edge computers complement cloud-based services; they can provide tighter control over timing and security that is robust against network outages, play an active role in managing interactions between things, and isolate safetycritical services from best-effort services. We explain how time sensitive network technology can be leveraged to reliably orchestrate a multiplicity of things, and how augmenting our programming models with a well-defined notion of time can make systems more deterministic and more testable.

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