Introduction

This short whitepaper discusses the Flightdeck-UI monitoring solution. The goal is to create a system suitable for real-time operator feedback in a variety of applications, such as Internet web servers, intranet environments, and industrial processes.

The first stage of the work is to enable so-called soft real-time monitoring, where the late delivery of data is not considered catastrophic. With general-purpose operating systems (such as Linux, Windows and Solaris) and TCP/IP networks, that is the best possible solution. The requirements of hard real-time applications (such as the control systems of robots) cannot be met with general purpose software, simply because such software does not guarantee that any event would happen by a particular deadline.

Soft real-time monitoring can be useful in industrial applications as well, as evidenced by the popularity of web-based process control. Nevertheless, hard real-time performance is often required for these applications. Ways to achieve it in the context of Flightdeck-UI are also discussed in this document.