Educational Objectives for Embedded Systems

Adequate concepts, professionalism and ethics are identified as the goals in properly educating systems engineers for professional life. Criteria and concepts appropriate to design feasible solutions must be based on fully understanding the peculiarities of the environments where embedded systems are employed. Bad practices of the computing profession need to be overcome to foster professionalism, and the consequences of the shift from hardware to software must be realised. This gives rise to some rules of ethics and proper conduct. Which issues should be addressed by curricula on real-time and embedded systems that are longer lived than technical artefacts, and that constitute elements of proper university education? My answer is that engineering professionals should be educated on the following fundamental essentials: adequate concepts, professionalism, ethics. Computer control totally differs from other areas of computing as processing takes place not only in real time, but also in real environments into which real-time systems are embedded and to whose requests they react. Essential is that they always deal with reality, and that there are always physical environments with their own laws, which cannot be forced under the rules of computers. Although performing control functions, embedded systems thus always take the position of slaves, whereas the environments constitute the masters. This very nature of real-time computing must particularly be taken into account when developing abstractions in order not to lose coherence with reality. Owing to the embedding into physical environments, systems engineers must have a deep understanding of computing, of physics, and of the applicationspecific requirements. The methods to be employed are not general-purpose ones, but must always be selected in environmentand process-specific ways. Dealing with the real world also implies that physical constraints must be observed, holding first and foremost for the time dimension and time-related requirements. When designing systems, this calls for applying static design and analysis methods as well as the concept of resource adequacy, i.e., computers must physically provide all resources required in the worst cases. In other words, one may not resort to the popular method of dynamically creating “virtual resources”.