Special issue on engineering collaborative embedded systems

摘要

Welcome to the special issue on "Collaborative Embedded Systems" (CrESt). While in the old days software in embedded systems was isolated and mainly concentrating on predefined functionalities within the overall system context, software has now become the connecting factor between cooperating systems of systems and, because of its increasing functionality, also the driving complexity factor. Cyber-physical systems are composed of several autonomous individual systems, which have to collaborate in order to achieve common objectives. Collaboration of systems is necessarily based on collaboration of connected software components that control and govern the overall cyber-physical system behaviour.