Embedded Control: From Asynchrony to Synchrony and Back
Paul Caspi
EMSOFT2001, Lake Tahoe, October 2001.
We propose in this paper a historical perspective of programming
issues found in the implementation of control systems, based on the author's
observations for more than fifteen years, but especially during the
Crisys Esprit project. We show that in contrast with the
asynchronous tradition of computer scientists, control engineers
were naturally led to a synchronous practice that was later formalised
and generalised by computer people. But, we also show that, for the
sake of robustness and distribution those practitioners had to
incorporate some degree of asynchrony in this synchronous approach and
we try to comment the resulting programming style.
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