Real-time control systems: a tutorial

The literature about real-time systems presents digital control or computer controlled systems as one of its most important practical application field. However, it is very difficult to find in these textbooks real-time control aspects. It seems to be more natural that these applications should be treated as part of digital control courses. In spite of that, control system literature rarely includes extensively the real-time subject and it does normally not pay attention to real-time aspects beyond algorithms and choice of sampling times. The aim of this paper is to highlight important issues about real-time systems that should be taken into account at the moment to implement digital control.