Embedded systems have become indispensable in our lives: household appliances, cars, airplanes, power plant control systems, medical equipment, telecommunication systems, space technology, they all contain digital computing systems with dedicated functionality. Most of them, if not all, are real-time systems, i.e. their responses to stimuli have timeliness constraints.

The timeliness requirement has to be met despite some unpredictable, stochastic behaviour of the system. In this book, we address one cause of such stochastic behaviour, namely the application and platform-dependent...