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Reviewer: Martin William Sachs

In real-time systems, correctness has a time dimension: every task must meet a defined deadline or response time. A practical real-time monitoring and control program consists of a number of tasks with different timing requirements, all of which must be satisfied concurrently. This book presents a methodology for the design of real-time systems based on rate monotonic analysis (RMA). It is suitable as both a textbook and a designer's handbook. The core of the book is a detailed exposition of RMA-based design, which takes the engineer, step by step, through defining requirements and then through the sequence of decisions needed to formulate a system design. Decision tables guide the designer through the material based on system requirements and characteristics. For each situation, alternative implementations are discussed. For example, for bursty events with hard deadlines, the book discusses an interrupt handler, servicing the event at a specified priority, use of a polling task, and use of a sporadic server. At the heart of the methodology is a schedulability analysis, which determines whether a given design can satisfy the deadlines of all the e vents. Uniprocessor systems are treated in detail, and then additional multiprocessor and distributed systems issues are discussed. Attention is also paid to operating system effects and how to analyze them. The authors provide a good overview of the concepts, including a large bibliography. Finally, they give detailed examples of the entire design process for several complex systems, including both successful and unsuccessful designs.