Distribution diagnosis of networked embedded system

The progress in microelectronics allows to integrate, in embedded systems, both digital computation and communication network capabilities. During the last years, smart sensors and actuators, then embedded systems and network sensors have appeared. They lead to development of networked embedded system. These systems have to comply with safety requirements but they are constantly under cost pressure. In introduction to the session on “Low-Cost Safe Embedded Control System”, the paper is interested to these news architectures and poses the problem of the fault detection and isolation. It gives different points of view which are considered in the literature for studying the origin of the failure : some works concern only sensors, actuators and physical process, some works focus on monitoring of the network, others sum up the networks in estimated delay, then some problems that are not yet treated are given. (copyright IFAC 2008).