Major challenges in the software development of distributed systems are rooted in the complex nature of coordination. Assertions are a practical programming mechanism to improve the quality of software in general by monitoring it at runtime. Most approaches today limit assertions to statements about local states whereas coordination requires reasoning about distributed states. The Peer Model is an event-based coordination programming model that relies on known foundations like shared tuple spaces, Actor Model, and Petri Nets. We extend it with distributed runtime invariant assertions that are specified and implemented using its own coordination mechanisms. This lifts the concept of runtime assertions to the level of coordination modeling. The concept is demonstrated by means of an example from the railway domain.

FPGAs are becoming more popular in the domain of safety-critical applications (such as space applications) due to their high performance, re-programmability and reduced development cost. Such systems require FPGAs with selfdetection and self-repairing capabilities in order to cope with errors due to the harsh conditions that usually exist in such environments. In this paper, a new dynamic fault recovery technique is proposed using the runtime partial reconfiguration (PR) property in FPGAs. It focuses on open interconnect faults and relies on specifying a Partially Reconfigurable block in the FPGA that is only used during the recovery process after the failure of the first module in the system. The technique uses only one location to recover from errors in any of the FPGA's modules. Accordingly, it requires less area overhead when compared to other techniques.

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Absirat. Using runtime reconfigurable systems can greatly increase the functional density of given area of silicon. Runtime reconfigurability is. for hardware designers, as virtual memory is, for software designers. By dynamically reconfiguring a device during its runtime, designers may implement so many functionalities on a limited area of silicon. This paper emphasizes this concept by implementing a set of digital filters. We chose the digital filters because of their importance to many computing tasks.It was shoNvn that a considerable gain in the functional density is obtained when runtime reconfiguration is tised.