|
Real-Time Resources
 This is my list of
recommended resources pertinent to real-time - or, more
generally, time-critical - computing systems. It differs
from the numerous other lists of real-time resources found
on the web and elsewhere in several important ways.
 | It is not confined to
the small niche of traditional static, periodic, device-level
"hard" real-time computing. Instead, it
| encompasses the whole
space of time-critical and time constraint driven systems
at every level in an enterprise |
| specifically emphasizes
large, complex, dynamic, distributed, time-critical systems
| that are essential to
many enterprises, especially in my application
domain of military
surveillance and combat
platform management, battle management, and C2 |
| but that are not understood and addressed
by most real-time and other (e.g., scheduling
theory) researchers
|
|
|
| It includes some useful resources
about the complex, dynamic, distributed,
time-critical characteristics of those applications
and enterprises
|
| It seeks to contribute
added value by providing my personal perspective on
the resources - for example, it includes a list of
relevant books (currently only books I recommend) with my brief
annotations
|
| It tries to minimize
duplicating the resources found on other web sites,
instead providing links to the best of those other web
sites
|
| You can subscribe to the
RSS feed (what's
that?) for this page using the feed link above. |
Recommended Books
Relevant to Real-Time Computing Systems
This is a list of books I
recommend that are related
in important (but perhaps not always initially obvious) ways to
real-time computing systems in the general sense of managing resources to
acceptably satisfy
completion time and other constraints with acceptable
predictability -- at all levels of an enterprise "from sensor to CEO"
or "from sensor to commander" in my DoD world. Traditional static,
periodic, device-level real-time computing involves only
a narrow subset of this topic.
The books currently on this list
are among (i.e., do not yet include all) those that I've had time to formulate a positive
opinion about. As for those books not on this list, I may not
even know about some of them, or I may not yet have copies of
some of them, or I may not yet have had time to formulate an
opinion on some of them, or my opinion on some of them may not be
positive, or I have not gotten around to adding them to this list (feel free to ask me which category any particular
absent book falls in, although I don't promise to always answer,
especially in writing).
Each book listing includes (or
eventually will include) my
brief annotation, which is intended only to give some feeling for
why I recommend it, not to constitute a summary or review of the
book. Sometimes I also use the annotation as an opportunity to
add related observations.
Although this list is about only
books, often papers or technical reports are more useful
resources - but since there are so many of those that I like, I
doubt that I could ever have time to create a list for more
than a few of them. My current compromise is to provide only a
few papers that serve as references in my book commentaries.
Alberts, D. S. and T. J. Czerwinski (Eds.).
Complexity,
Global Politics, and National Security, National Defense
University, June 1997.
This is the Proceedings of a
conference on the application of complexity theory to the policy
and strategic dimensions of national defense and international
affairs. One would hardly imagine that there needed to be
arguments that warfare and politics are nonlinear dynamic systems
(Clausewitz’s "Fog of war" is almost a household phrase),
especially since complexity theory has been successfully applied
to so many other endeavors and enterprises. But only recently has
complexity theory become a mainstream and indeed official tool in
the policy and strategic domains of the national security arena.
One chapter of this book focuses on the implications of complexity theory on
military command and control:
Command and (Out of) Control: The Military Implications of Complexity Theory, by John
Schmitt. I quote his closing paragraph: "Complexity encourages us
to consider war in different terms which in turn point to a
different approach to the command and control of military action.
It will be an approach that does not expect or pursue certainty
or precise control but is able to function despite uncertainty
and disorder. If there is a single unifying thread to this
discussion, it is the importance of adaptation, both for success
on the battlefield and for institutional survival. In any
environment characterized by unpredictability, uncertainty, fluid
dynamics, and rapid change, the system that can adapt best and
most quickly will be the system that prevails. Complexity
suggests that the single most important quality of effective
command and control for the coming uncertain future will be
adaptability." It is obvious that warfare -- particularly command
and control, battle management, and surveillance and combat platform management --
entail many mission-critical activities in circumstances
requiring acceptable satisfaction of conflicting timeliness and
other constraints with acceptable predictability, despite dynamic
uncertainties. But adaptability is not a property of almost all
traditional real-time computing concepts and techniques, because
they are limited to simple static subsystems. Hence they are
often necessary at the device level, but never sufficient at the
levels above. Adaptive time-critical supra-device resource
management concepts and techniques seem unlikely to emerge from
the traditional real-time research and practitioner communities,
which appear to be largely oblivious to system-level needs. This
web site is intended to help rectify that.
Baptiste, P., C. Le Pape,
and W. Nuijten, Constraint-Based Scheduling:
Applying Constraint Programming to Scheduling Problems, 2001, Kluwer Academic, ISBN 0-7923-7408-8.
The book's web page on the publisher's site.
It seems natural (to me, at
least) to think of scheduling as a constraint satisfaction
problem -- as opposed to thinking of it as an objective function
optimization (or even schedule decision) problem -- especially in the realistic cases where
there are multiple resource and other constraints or multiple optimization criteria. Multicriteria scheduling is exceptionally difficult as an
optimization problem; see T'Kindt et al. In recent years, people (especially Europeans) have increasingly
been seeking the best of both worlds by recasting scheduling
problems in the framework of constraint based programming (most commonly shop scheduling problems,
the subset of which that have timeliness-based objective
functions can be relevant to time-critical computing systems). This
book is the newest one, and the only one still in print, on the topic of constraint-based
scheduling. (Fox published a pioneering one in 1988, based on his
Ph.D. thesis:
Constraint-Directed Search: A Case Study of Job-Shop Scheduling,
Morgan Kaufmann, ASIN 0934613567.)
All of the authors were or still are associated with
ILOG, a French
company that appears to be the leading vendor of commercial
constraint-based scheduling (and other optimization) tools and
services. Unfortunately, both the book and ILOG's current
products are limited to deterministic scheduling (see the note in
my
Brucker annotation about the use of the term "deterministic.") However, the
book is an excellent comprehensive and readable source of quite
current information on that topic. Stochastic constraint-based
scheduling is still too nascent to be the subject of a book as of
this date.
Briand, L., and D. Roy,
Meeting Deadlines in Hard Real-Time Systems: The Rate
Monotonic Approach, IEEE Computer Society, 1999, ISBN
0-818-67406-7.
Amazon.com has 28 sample pages, including the
table of contents and index.
This is the best book for
learning one
particular kind of real-time analysis -- rate-monotonic analysis
(RMA). RMA techniques are realistic and effective for
certain highly stylized, static, situations (fewer than some of its most ardent proponents claim);
if yours is one for which it is, you need this
book. For a more detailed (but less current and now out of print) treatment, see Klein
et al. (A Practitioner's Handbook for
Real-Time Analysis, Kluwer, 1993, ISBN 0-7923-9361-9).
Brucker, P.,
Scheduling Algorithms, 3rd edition, September
2002, Springer Verlag, ISBN 3-540-41510-6.
Table of contents on
the publisher's web site.
This is the most contemporary
and thorough book currently available on deterministic scheduling
theory; for example, it includes more material on computational
complexity issues than do older scheduling books. I recommend
reading Pinedo's textbook (at least the deterministic part) as an
introduction before reading this more focused book. Note that
deterministic scheduling theory is much broader than the
technically correct use (as opposed to all the popular incorrect
uses) of the term "deterministic" in real-time computing. For example, deterministic
scheduling theory is widely applied in cases where the time
constraints are in terms of lateness and the optimality criteria
involve minimization of an objective function; while in real-time
computing, "deterministic" is employed solely and more
simply in terms of
always meeting all hard deadlines.
Burns, A. and A. Wellings,
Real-Time Systems and Programming
Languages: Ada 95, Real-Time Java, and Real-Time POSIX, 3rd
edition, 2003, Addison Wesley Longman, ISBN 0-201-72988-1. Good web site by the authors
includes lecture slides and errata.
28 sample pages including the table of contents and index at
Amazon.com.
This 3rd edition of the
authors' deservedly very popular textbook is a major update that
includes the Real-Time Specification for Java (RTSJ) as one of the core
real-time languages. (See Dibble for more detail about the RTSJ.) It also improves its coverage of scheduling,
including some material about the Earliest Deadline First (EDF)
discipline in the context of real-time computing systems (for a great deal more information about EDF, read
some scheduling theory books and papers, starting with
Pinedo). Although the book is centered
around real-time programming languages, it is a valuable textbook
about a number of key real-time programming topics, and should be
on everyone's short list.
Cheng, A.M.K.,
Real-Time Systems: Scheduling, Analysis, and Verification,
Wiley Interscience, 2002, ISBN 0-471-18406-3.
Amazon.com's page
about this book has 49 sample pages, including the table of
contents and index.
There are many scholarly
papers, and several books (mostly compendia of papers) in the
area of formal analysis and verification of real-time systems.
This book provides an accessible, self-contained, more unified
treatment of the various approaches to that topic. It also serves
as a good reference by having an extensive bibliography. Everyone
interested in real-time computing -- even (or especially) if born
without the theory gene -- can benefit from this excellent
book.
Chretienne, P., E.G. Coffman,
Jr., J.K. Lenstra, and Z. Liu (Eds.), Scheduling Theory and
its Applications, John Wiley and Sons, 1995,
ISBN 0-471-94059-3.
Book web page
on the publisher's web site.
This is an excellent collection
of survey, tutorial, and research papers from a 1992 summer school on scheduling theory. It
is one of the few that addresses both the classical deterministic and queuing models,
and it also
reflects the relatively recent influences of computer science
(computational complexity) on
scheduling theory. Pineto's textbook (see below) makes a good
prerequisite for this more advanced one.
D'Agostini, G.,
Bayesian Reasoning in Data Analysis - A Critical Introduction,
World Scientific Publishing, 2003, ISBN 981-238-356-5.
Book web page
on the publisher's web site;
detailed outline on the author's web site.
The Bayesian interpretation of
probability (in short, that
probability measures degrees of subjective belief and that
statistical inference is an extension of decision theory)
is very useful in reasoning about
predictability of timeliness in dynamic real-time systems (some day I'll get around to adding an
introduction to that on this web site). You can get somewhat of a
feeling for that from D'Agostini's lucid examples of erroneous physics
resulting from inappropriate interpretations of probability
mathematics on his
web site - e.g.,
Bayesian
Reasoning in High Energy Physics - Principles and Applications.
Recently he has written this very readable introduction to the
topic.
Dempster, M.A.H., J.K. Lenstra,
and A.H.G. Rinnooy Kan (Eds.), Deterministic and Stochastic
Scheduling, D. Reidel, 1982,
ISBN 90-277-1397-9.
This collection of papers from a
NATO ASI course remains in my opinion the single best advanced survey of
both classical deterministic and stochastic scheduling theory. While the book stops at
1981, the material is foundational and thus
durable. Its perspective is that of operations research and shop
scheduling rather than of computer scheduling theory -- but much
of it is relevant to time-critical computer systems (particularly
above the device level). A similar but less comprehensive book is Computer and
Job-Shop Scheduling Theory, edited by Coffman (John Wiley and
Sons, 1976), also out of print. A more recent compilation of papers
which partially updates Dempster et al. is
Chretienne et al. Pineto is the best
pre-requisite to Dempster et al.
Dibble, P.,
Real-Time Java Platform Programming,
Prentice Hall PTR, 2002, ISBN 0-1302-8261-8.
Written by a member of the
Real-Time Specification for Java's core team, this book explains
the features of the RTSJ. Thus, it elaborates on the
specification per se (Bollella et al., The Real-Time
Specification for Java, Addison Wesley, 2000, ISBN
0-201-70323-8) -- which, like any
specification, is not easy reading, and which, in the absence of Dibble's
book, would be on my list (although it is now somewhat out of
date with respect to more recent improvements in the RTSJ). Burns and Welling provide a broader,
more comparative, but necessarily less detailed, look at the RTSJ. There remains a need for an
RTSJ Rationale book analogous to the Ada 95 Rationale (edited by
Barnes, Springer Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-540-63143-7); Bollella
and Gosling have spoken of eventually writing such a rationale. Dibble -- a master practitioner
of traditional real-time computing -- undergoes, as he told me
himself, an enlightening evolution in his perception of some aspects of
real-time during the process of his writing this book; I wonder
if and how it might have been different from the beginning given
his perspective at the end. I may find out, since he is preparing
a second edition of this book.
Earman, J., A Primer on
Determinism, D. Reidel, 1986,
ISBN 90-277-2240-4.
"Determinism" is almost
inevitably -- and incorrectly -- used in definitions or
characterizations of real-time computing. Of course there are
numerous books that address determinism in the context of
philosophy (e.g., epistemology and ontology, free will, etc.),
but this textbook
describes, in an accessible introductory way, Earman's viewpoint on determinism in the
specific context of
the philosophy of science -- how he believes determinism works and does not
work in modern physics. Earman deals with randomness and
chaos, free will, quantum indeterminism, and the
relationship between determinism and Turing's effective
computability (but Ruelle provides better
coverage of chaos specifically). (See my observations about
predictability for some of my perspective on determinism in the context of
time-critical computer systems.)
French, S., Sequencing and
Scheduling,
Ellis Horwood, 1982,
ISBN 0-85312-299-7/0-85312-364-0,
and Halsted Press, ISBN
0-470-27229-5.
In my opinion, French's has been
the best of the textbooks I'd seen on the mathematics of
deterministic shop scheduling, and it remains one of most
readable. The runner up in both respects to French had been
Introduction to Sequencing and Scheduling by Baker (John
Wiley, 1974). Another worthwhile book (but
not really a textbook) is the classic Theory of Scheduling
by Conway et al. (Addison-Wesley,
1976). All of those books are out of print. Now there is only Brucker's book
on deterministic scheduling, and it
is much more up to date. But Pineto's wonderful textbook
provides an accessible introduction to
stochastic as well as deterministic scheduling.
Gallmeister, B.O., POSIX .4:
Programming for the Real World, O'Reilly,
1995, June 1998 printing, ISBN
1-56592-074-0.
Book's (excellent) page on the publisher's
web site.
This is the first book, and the
most readable published information source, about what the POSIX
1004.1b (nee' 1003.4) real-time extensions are and how to use
them. There needs to be a revised edition to reflect more recent
developments in the real-time extensions -- e.g., the services
originally specified in amendments 1003.1d, 1003.1g, 1003.1j, and
1003.1q, and now included in 1003.1-2001. The POSIX real-time
market may currently be stagnant (outside DoD at least), while real-time
LINUX seems to be getting more attention. The Real-Time LINUX
field has a problem of its own -- the schism between layered (or
master/slave) approaches, exemplified by
RTAI, and native
approaches, exemplified by
RTLINUX and so-called resource kernel's such as
Rajkumar's.
Gillies, Donald,
Philosophical Theories of Probability. Routledge, 2000, ISBN 0-415-18275-1.
Book's page on publisher's web site.
Most of us who took an
undergraduate (or perhaps even a graduate) course in statistics
and/or probability usually are surprised if and when we later
discover that we were taught something about the mathematics
of probability but little if anything about the wide divergence
of interpretations of the mathematics, and the suitability of
these interpretations for various applications. Although
interpretation of the mathematics is regarded as being in the
field of the philosophy of science, it cannot be ignored on that
basis by users
of the mathematics. Failure to employ an
interpretation of probability that is appropriate to one's
application can easily result in erroneous conclusions.
D'Agostini provides numerous lucid examples of erroneous physics
resulting from inappropriate interpretations of probability
mathematics, on his
web site - e.g.,
Bayesian
Reasoning in High Energy Physics - Principles and Applications.
Similarly, not
all interpretations of probability are equally useful in
reasoning about the predictability of
timeliness of real-time computing systems - especially dynamic
ones. This is one of my three favorite books that provide an
introductory
survey of most of the prominent theories of probability.
Halpern's Reasoning about
Uncertainty is the best textbook on the subject of reasoning
about uncertainty, and not only with probability theory. My other two
favorites are more probability-focused monographs: this book by Gillies; and von Plato's
Creating Modern Probability : Its Mathematics, Physics and
Philosophy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge University Press,
1994).
Halang, W.A., and A.D. Stoyenko,
Real Time Computing.
Springer-Verlag, 1994, ISBN 0-387-57558.
This unique collection of papers
from a NATO ASI course is encyclopedic and eclectic in the breadth of its
coverage of real-time computing topics. Despite the somewhat uneven
quality and depth of the papers, and its 1994 publication date, its breadth alone nonetheless
qualifies it in my opinion as one of the best
survey books written about real-time computing (but it is now out of print).
Halpern, J.Y.,
Reasoning about Uncertainty, MIT Press, Revised 2005, ISBN 0-262-58259-7.
Book's page on the publisher's web site.
Browse the book on Amazon.com.
This is a textbook, not a
monograph. It is written in a lucid, elaborated style, and is
unique in being both the most comprehensive and accessible
introduction to the field, and an authoritative reference. It
includes numerous examples and exercises. Halpern writes from
the perspective of his own unified theory, plausibility
measures, while explaining the panoply of theories for reasoning
about uncertainty. The enthusiastic endorsements on the back
cover are from the most distinguished researchers in the field.
Heitmeyer, C. and D. Mandrioli
(Eds.), Formal Methods for Real-Time Computing, John Wiley
& Sons, 1996, ISBN 0-471-95835-2. The authors have an
excellent
web page for the book that includes abstracts for each
of the contributed chapters.
This collection of separately
written chapters is a survey of formal methods theory and
practice in real-time computing. It is more contemporary and
comprehensive than van Tilborg and Koob's collection of work they
sponsored (Foundations of Real-Time Computing: Formal
Specifications and Methods, Kluwer 1991)
and Joseph's NATO ASI Proceedings (Formal Techniques
in Real-Time and Fault Tolerant Systems, Springer Verlag
1988). Unfortunately all three of these books are now out of
print. While there are many books on formal methods in computer
science, there were none in print that focus on real-time (which
probably tells us something) until Cheng's
new and excellent one.
Kahneman, D., P. Slovic, and A.
Tversky (Eds.), Judgment Under Uncertainty, Cambridge
University Press, 1982, ISBN 0-521-28414-7.
Book's page on the publisher's web site.
This superior collection of cognitive
psychology papers reveals the innate human weaknesses in reasoning
probabilistically in the presence of uncertainties, especially
about unlikely events -- I list some of these weaknesses here.
These weaknesses plague our everyday lives, but more importantly
(here) they are manifest in how people establish and express
requirements for most computer systems (outside the hard
real-time computing niche) and how they evaluate them
Awareness and understanding of this cognitive
factor is essential (but all too often absent) for designers and
users of mission-critical and safety-critical computing systems,
especially real-time ones, to minimize the
distortions of reality that it inevitably introduces. A follow-up
(not a replacement) book is Decision Making by Bell,
Raiffa, and Tversky (Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).
Numerous books of varying quality on this topic of ubiquitous
errors of human judgment and decision making can be found on
amazon.com. This topic, and the related one of how people irrationally judge
risks and hazards, comes up occasionally in the
RISKS newsgroup -- for example,
Volume
17 number 71, 72, and 73.
Kahneman received the 2002 Nobel prize in economics for his work on
this topic (Tversky had died).
Klir, J., and M. Wierman,
Uncertainty-Based Information, 2nd Ed., Physica-Verlag, 1989,
ISBN 3-7908-1242-0.
Book's page at the publisher's web site.
Look in this book at Amazon.com.
To appear...
Northcutt, J.,
Mechanisms for Reliable Distributed Real-Time Operating Systems:
The Alpha Kernel, Academic Press, May 1987, ASIN 0125216904.
Book's page at Amazon.com.
This is the (now out of print)
book version of Northcutt's Ph.D. thesis at Carnegie Mellon
University. It is noteworthy as the only book-length integrated
documentation of the philosophy, architecture, and implementation
details of the Alpha real-time distributed operating system
kernel created by my Archons research group in CMU's Computer Science
Department. We wrote numerous technical reports on individual
aspects of Alpha, and a number of conference and journal papers
-- some of which are available on my Referenced Documents page,
and others are available by request from me. Alpha was literally
unique in the annals of distributed real-time OS research for the
concepts it pioneered, and was even unusual in its implementation
directly on the bare hardware of each multiprocessor node of the
LAN (instead of the usual academic practice of layering a
research OS on a UNIX or modifying a UNIX). The keystone concepts
and techniques which débuted in
Alpha have not languished in academic obscurity as have so many
other good research results -- instead, they have continued to
advance beyond Alpha and this book, to this very day. For
example: KSR and Concurrent Computer implemented a Version 2 of
Alpha (but didn't survive long enough to productize it); the time/utility
function model as defined on this web site is more completely
and correctly developed; publications of academic research on
time/utility functions are rapidly increasing (see
Our Documents); versions of distributed
threads called "migrating threads" were at the heart of several
research OS microkernels; the Open Group's (ne'e Open Software Foundation's) MK7.3A
operating system incorporated more sophisticated versions of
Alpha's distributed threads and scheduling framework (as did
IBM's unreleased Workplace OS for PowerPC, and DEC's unreleased
Libra ORB and OS); the Distributed Real-Time Specification for
Java and OMG's Real-Time CORBA 2/Dynamic Scheduling standard
include versions of distributed threads. [References and links to
all these will appear on this page as I get the time.]
Pinedo, M., Scheduling:
Theory, Algorithms, and Systems, 2nd edition, Prentice Hall,
2002, ISBN 0-130-28138-7. The
table of contents on Prentice Hall's web site.
Book's page at Amazon.com.
The first edition of this was
the first textbook on both deterministic and stochastic
scheduling theory to be published in over a decade. It covers
applications as well as theory. So if you can have only one
scheduling theory book on your shelf, it should be this one. Pinedo's
book can be supplemented with the Chretienne et al.'s collection of research papers on both deterministic and
stochastic scheduling theory.
Powell, D. (Ed.), Delta-4: A
Generic Architecture for Dependable Computing,
Springer-Verlag, 1991, ISBN 3-540-54985-4/0-387-54985-4.
Book's page on the publisher's web site.
Book's page at Amazon.com.
Only rarely is there an
opportunity to design and build the hardware and software of a complete real-time distributed computer
system from the ground up, and even rarer are those whose
results are publicly and so thoroughly documented. Esprit provided such an
opportunity on a large scale, and there are many interesting
lessons to be learned from that project.
Rembold, U., B.O. Nnaji, and A. Storr, Computer
Integrated Manufacturing and Engineering, Addison-Wesley,
1993, ISBN 0-201-56541-2.
Book's page at Amazon.com.
This is the best single book
I've found on computer integrated manufacturing. A helpful
adjunct is the
ISA's A Reference Model for Computer
Integrated Manufacturing, edited by Williams. Industrial automation (IA),
both discrete manufacturing and continuous process control, are
among the most important applications of real-time computing. One
reason which is little-understood by most real-time researchers
and practitioners alike is that IA (along
with certain military and aerospace applications) is the primary
context for advancing the state of the real-time control and
computing arts beyond the classical first-order unit level.
Enterprise integration has recently become very fashionable (in
the military as well as the IA contexts), but in the IA field (at
least) this integration tends to stop at the semi-permeable
membrane between the process/production levels below and the
business levels above. Hence, time-critical resource management
issues almost never are addressed across that boundary, resulting
in unfortunate behavioral anomalies in the enterprise. The
leading visionary on time-critical closed loop control of enterprises "from
sensor to CEO" -- taking a cybernetics (system science)
approach -- is Jay Bayne, whose web site is echelon4.com.
Although his application domain focus has, until recently, been IA, his
perspectives apply equally well to military and other application
domains.
Ruelle, D., Chance and Chaos,
Princeton University Press, 1991,
ISBN 0-691-08574-9.
Book''s
page at the publisher's website.
Look in this book at Amazon.com.
This succinct book by a
mathematical physicist presents chance and chaos with the best
balance of readability and technical accuracy that I've seen (Gleick's
better known one exhibits misunderstandings and errors which
might be expected from a populist writer). If you then want to
pursue this topic further, I recommend you next read
Randomness and Undecidability in Physics by Svozil (World
Scientific Press, 1993). The many books in
the general field of chaos have a variety of different goals and
perspectives (for example, often fractal images are the focus).
These two books emphasize randomness, and consequently are more
useful for readers interested in applicability to real-time
computing.
Schum, D.,
The Evidential Foundations of Probabilistic Reasoning,
Northwestern University Press, 1994,
ISBN 0-8101-1821-1.
Book's page on the publisher's web site.
Look in this book at Amazon.com.
Real-time systems are designed
and implemented -- implicitly more than explicitly,
unfortunately -- largely based on beliefs and evidence about the
expected behavior of the application. Static (hard) real-time
systems are often mistakenly based on over-simplified flawed
beliefs and evidence. Dynamic real-time systems have various
degrees of uncertainty in their environments and thus their
behaviors. Thus, reasoning about them, especially their
timeliness, is more difficult than for static ones -- e.g.,
using probabilistic formalisms, such as covered in
Halpern's book. Schum provides an
examination and theory of evidence that is used when reasoning
-- for our purposes, in the context of both static and dynamic
real-time systems. From the book's back cover:
"No matter how irrefutable it may seem, evidence
is often a matter of interpretation. Incomplete, inconclusive, imprecise, or vague,
it is nonetheless the basis of myriad everyday conclusions and decisions. In this
authoritative work, David A. Schum develops a general theory of evidence as it is
understood and applied across a broad range of disciplines and practical undertakings.
Synthesizing insights from law, philosophy and logic, probability, semiotics, artificial
intelligence, psychology, and history, Schum provides a detailed examination of the
various properties and uses of evidence and the evaluative skills evidence requires.
Along with the evidential subtleties of probabilistic reasoning, Schum also explores
the processes by which evidence is generated or discovered and looks at the intellectual
and practical underpinnings of probabilistic reasoning. It is a useful resourse for
students, researchers, and practitioners of every discipline concerned with evidence
and its inferential use."
T'Kindt, V., and J.-C. Billout, Multicriteria
Scheduling, Springer Verlag, 2002, ISBN 3-540-43617-0.
Book's page on the publisher's web site.
Look inside this book at Amazon.com.
Scheduling theory has
historically been focused primarily on optimizing for a single
objective -- e.g., minimizing the number of missed deadlines or
mean tardiness -- with few exceptions such as also satisfying
precedence constraints. But often (perhaps usually) there are
multiple objectives to be optimized simultaneously, and in these
cases the already sparsely populated space of solved scheduling
problems becomes almost vacant. In contrast, there is a large
body of theory and practice on multicriteria decision making.
This book is the only one I know of that gathers together the
basic concepts of both scheduling theory and multicriteria
optimization, and then seeks to synthesize them into a new
multicriteria scheduling theory.
References for the Real-Time Book Commentaries (to
appear)
Bell
Clausewitz
D'Agnostini
Gleick
ISA
Joseph
Klein
Svozil
van Tilborg
von Plato, Jan, Creating
Modern Probability : Its Mathematics, Physics and Philosophy in
Historical Perspective, Cambridge University Press,
1994, ISBN 0-521-44403-9.
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