Distributed Control Systems (DCS) Group: Activity Report Pau Mart´ ı, Manel Velasco, Josep Gu` ardia, Rosa Casta˜ n´ e, Camilo Lozoya, Frederic P´ erez, Jos´ e Y´ epez, Jordi Ayza, Ricard Vill` a and Josep.M Fuertes Automatic Control Department, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain, e-mail: pau.marti@upc.edu Abstract—This report presents an overview of the recent and on-going research and technology transfer activities of the Distributed Control Systems (DCS) group. DCS research focuses on the study of the interaction of control systems and real-time computing and communications systems for build- ing efficient embedded control systems, networked control systems, and Quality-of-Service-aware systems. Research advances are transfered as technology transfer projects to private companies mainly working in the automotive and au- tomation sector. Index Terms— Control Systems, real-time systems, com- munication systems I. I NTRODUCTION This report presents an overview of the recent and on- going research and technology transfer activities of the Distributed Control Systems (DCS) group. DCS is a sub- group of the Grup de Recerca en Rob` otica Intel.ligent i Sistemes (GRINS) at the Universitat Polit` ecnica de Catalunya (UPC). DCS staff belongs to the Departament d’Enginyeria de Sistemes, Autom` atica i Inform` atica In- dustrial (ESAII) of UPC. DCS webpage can be found at http://dcs.upc.edu. DCS research focuses on the study of the interaction of control systems and real-time computing and communica- tions systems for building efficient embedded control sys- tems, networked control systems, and Quality-of-Service- aware (QoS aware) systems. Our research activities are mainly financed by public funds like Spanish research projects, e.g., projects from the Comisi´ on Interministerial de Ciencia y Tecnologia (CICYT, Interministerial Com- mission on Science and Technology) of the Spanish gov- ernment, and through the participation in european net- works of excellence. Research advances are transfered by technology ap- plied projects to private companies mainly working in the automotive (including car and train industry) and automa- tion sector. Future projects may cover the consumer elec- tronics and other sectors that require QoS aware comput- ing. The rest of this report is organized as follows. Section II presents our research activities. Section III describes the funding projects that sustain our research. Section IV presents recent, on-going and future technology transfer projects. Finally, section V concludes this report. II. RESEARCH ACTIVITIES The goal of the DCS research group is to develop so- lutions for (networked) systems with strict real-time re- quirements (e.g., control systems). This usually involve the study of resource-constrained systems. Mass market products are subject to hard economic constraints and, also, many high-tech products are subject to dimensional limitations or must work with restricted communication bandwidth, processor capacity or battery power. This suggests that computing resources (e.g., processor, bandwidth, battery) have to be exploited effi- ciently taking into account the application demands while providing the best operation. In this context, feedback mechanisms become fundamental. As a consequence, control, computing, and communication have to be jointly considered in any successful design. When considering integrated approaches, two main (non independent) disciplines apply: feedback of comput- ing systems and computing of feedback systems. The for- mer refers to the application of control theory to comput- ing systems in order to improve their performance. The later refers to the application of novel (real-time) comput- ing techniques to improve control systems performance. In addition, this may require new analysis and design tech- niques for control systems. Our research activities tackle several aspects of both disciplines: • control theory • real-time computing of distributed feedback control systems • feedback of computing systems • analysis and design tools Some of the work described next has been carried out together with (listed in alphabetical order) Prof. Luis Almeida (University of Aveiro, Portugal), Prof. Guillem Bernat (York University, UK), Prof. Scott Brandt (Univer- sity of California at Santa Cruz, USA), Prof. Giorgio But- tazzo (Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa, Italy), Prof. Anton Cervin (Lund University, Sweden), Prof. Gerhard Fohler (University of Kaiserslauten, Germany), Prof. Daniel Moss´ e (University of Pittsburgh, USA), and Prof. Krithi