## 1 Introduction  
The advances of computer technologies and the continuous growth of their applications bring new challenges (e.g., tasks concurrency in multicore processors) in building reliable real-time control systems. The complexity of such systems continues to increase, by integrating various computing and networking components and devices, particularly wireless communication equipment and other structures and services that rely on the physical world as well as on the virtual world e.g., cloud computing and the Internet-of-Things (IoT) [1, 2]. The drastic increase in the versatility of computingdevices and their deployment in key sectors, such as health-care, energy, and the military raises several issues regarding the reliability, availability, and adaptability of their operation. Many sectors rely on the reliable, on-schedule, and cost-efficient operation of such computer-based systems in order to provide appropriate and time effective services. Such essential aspects are a necessity for critical systems deployed in key sectors. In these environments, the architectural framework of such systems is based primarily on specialized or custom-built hardware/software (HW/SW) components, which impose extra undesirable costs, slow down the development and maintenance process, and limit the reusability and versatility of the final product or service [3]. The challenge of keeping the development and implementation of real-time control systems reliable and efficient, and at the same time, low-cost is getting harder. This is because system designers and developers are faced with the dependability, inflexibility, and often high-cost of the specialized hardware/software components [4; 5]. In addition, building systems based on specialized hardware/software imposes extra costs which are not desirable. Developers would prefer to utilize primarily general-purpose, reconfigurable/reprogrammable hardware/software components, in order to lower the cost, speed up the development process, and make the final product more versatile. Such components are commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) items sold in substantial quantities in the commercial marketplace. For example, commercial off-the-shelf components have become the preferred way of designers in military and aerospace applications for the development of unmanned aerial vehicles [6; 7]. The market of reliable real-time systems is rapidly expanding due to the increasing number of applications in several domains and sectors (e.g., health services, industrial robotics, unmanned aviation, smart cities, etc.). In such critical real-time systems, typically, the more severe the consequence of potential system failure, the more specialized the control system needs to be. Usually, such specialized solutions impose significant costs. The new market applications, particularly of reliable embedded systems in critical applications in IoT and cloud computing, are seeking to use low-cost COTS-based components and devices in building real-time control systems due to their immediate availability, rapid utilization, ease of reconfiguration, and versatility. Low-cost COTS components are expected also to affect the reliability of many systems, as reduced costs could improve the threshold for introducing reliable solutions in real-time systems too, for which reliability is not a strict prerequisite (e.g., in soft real-time systems). In this direction, several companies report the development of such systems based on COTS components. Just recently, companies such as Abaco Systems, Real-Time Innovations (RTI), and Wind River Co. announced the joint development of the first hardware, operating system, and communications framework with commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components for Airborne Systems [8]. Systems built on COTS-based components provide increased reliability and quality over custom-built components as these are utilized and validated by various independent developers and organizations, due to their large scale utilization in various applications and implementations.