This fascinating new work comes complete with more than 100 illustrations and a detailed practical prototype. It explores the domains encountered when designing a distributed embedded computer control system as an integrated whole. Basic issues about real-time systems and their properties, especially safety, are examined first. Then, system and hardware architectures are dealt with, along with programming issues, embodying desired properties, basic language subsets, object orientation and language support for hardware and software specifications.Table of Contents: Concepts.- Real-time Characteristics and Safety of Embedded Systems.- Multitasking.- Hardware and System Architectures.- Programming of Embedded Systems.- Implementation.- Hardware Platform.- Implementation of a Fault-tolerant Distributed Embedded System.- Asynchronous Real-time Execution with Runtime State Restoration.- Epilogue.