Given a synchronous system, we study the question whether – or, under which conditions – the behaviour of that system can be realized by a (non-trivially) distributed and hence asynchronous implementation. In this paper, we partially answer this question by examining the role of causality for the implementation of synchrony in two fundamental different formalisms of concurrency, Petri nets and the π-calculus. For both formalisms it turns out that each ‘good’ encoding of synchronous interactions using just asynchronous interactions introduces causal dependencies in the translation.

The complexity of embedded systems has risen significantly in the last years. The model based development approach helped to keep an overview over the development and over the fulfillment of non-functional properties, as it is possible to capture and analyze the scheduling using UML development models. Other aspects, e.g. the power consumption, are not considered in development models, modelling languages, and analysis support based on development models. The common approach is to measure the consumption at the end of the development, but there is no tool support for earlier phases analysis. We present a UML profile for power/energy consumption and a simple algorithm to analyze the power consumption based on an UML model extended with our profile. As more power awareness could result in losing real-time constraints, we consider both aspects, real-time scheduling and power awareness, and present a method to bring both non-functional properties and their analyses in context. Additionally, we present an approach to find a task configuration for a dynamic voltage scaling system that satisfies all real-time requirements, but is most power efficient.

In this paper a new flexible communication architecture for high dynamic robot applications is presented. The motivation for the development is founded on the special requirements imposed by PKMs (parallel kinematic machines). PKMs obtain a different kinematic structure compared to their serial counterparts based on closed kinematic chains. This structural feature leads to a number of favorable properties as high structural stiffness, high accuracy and low moved masses resulting in high payload to robot mass ratio. This paper also introduces the structure and application of a new communication architecture matching with the needs of high-dynamic parallel robot systems.