I am happy to announce the appearance today of a special issue of the
Leibniz Transactions on Embedded Systems dedicated to distributed hybrid
systems and edited by Alessandro Abate, Martin Fränzle and myself:
https://ojs.dagstuhl.de/index.php/lites/issue/view/lites-v008-i002
Foreword abstract:
This special issue contains seven papers within the broad subject of
Distributed Hybrid Systems, that is, systems combining hybrid
discrete-continuous state spaces with elements of concurrency and logical or
spatial distribution. It follows up on several workshops on the same theme
which were held between 2017 and 2019 and organized by the editors of this
volume.
The first of these workshops was held in Aalborg, Denmark, in August 2017
and associated with the MFCS conference. It featured invited talks by
Alessandro Abate, Martin Fränzle, Kim G.~Larsen, Martin Raussen, and Rafael
Wisniewski. The second workshop was held in Palaiseau, France, in July 2018,
with invited talks by Luc Jaulin, Thao Dang, Lisbeth Fajstrup, Emmanuel
Ledinot, and André Platzer. The third workshop was held in Amsterdam, The
Netherlands, in August 2019, associated with the CONCUR conference. It
featured a special theme on distributed robotics and had invited talks by
Majid Zamani, Hervé de Forges, and Xavier Urbain.
The vision and purpose of the DHS workshops was to connect researchers
working in real-time systems, hybrid systems, control theory, formal
verification, distributed computing, and concurrency theory, in order to
advance the subject of distributed hybrid systems. Such systems are
abundant and often safety-critical, but ensuring their correct functioning
can in general be challenging. The investigation of their dynamics by
analysis tools from the aforementioned domains remains fragmentary,
providing the rationale behind the workshops: it was conceived that
convergence and interaction of theories, methods, and tools from these
different areas was needed in order to advance the subject.