Abstract
Software transactional memory (STM) is a synchronisation paradigm which improves the parallelism and composability of modern applications executing on a multi-core architecture. However, to abort and retry a transaction multiple times may have a negative impact on the temporal characteristics of a real-time task set. This paper addresses this issue: It provides a framework in which an upper-bound on the worst-case response time of each task is derived, assuming that tasks are scheduled by following either the Non-Preemptive During Attempt (NPDA), Non-Preemptive Until Commit (NPUC) or Stack Resource Policy for Transactional Memory (SRPTM) policy.

Abstract
The FlexOffer (FO) concept was initially created within the EU FP7 project MIRABEL [1]. It permits exposing demand and supply loads with associated flexibilities in time and quantity for energy commerce, load levelling, and different use-cases. To put it in a simple way, a FO specifies an amount of energy, a duration, an earliest begin time, a latest finish time, and a price, e.g., "I want 50 KWh over 3 hours between 5 PM and 12 PM, for a value of 0.25 €/kWh".

Abstract
This paper presents how the ICT infrastructure developed in the European ENCOURAGE project, centered around a message oriented middleware, enabled energy savings in buildings and households. The components of the middleware, as well as the supervisory control strategy, are overviewed, to support the presentation of the results and how they could be achieved. The main results are presented on three of the pilots of the project, a first one consisting of a single household, a second one of a residential neighborhood, and a third one in a university campus.

Abstract
The Arrowhead Framework is a European effort that aims to apply Service Oriented Architecture to the embedded systems' world. The Event Handler system is a component that supports the handling of events, and in that sense it enriches service-oriented applications with the capabilities of interacting via the publish/subscribe paradigm. In fact, the Event Handler system is in charge of the notification of events that occur in a given Arrowhead compliant installation, manages producers and consumers of events, allows filtering of messages, and manages historical data regarding events. This latter capability is performed either on local files, on a database, or through another component of the Arrowhead Framework - the Historian system. The net result of the integration of the Event Handler in an Arrowhead Framework simplifies and empowers the communication of its components, as it is demonstrated in the paper with two examples: the management of application faults, and the support to quality of service of orchestrated services.

Abstract
This paper presents an architecture that supports Quality of Service (QoS) in an Arrowhead-compliant System of Systems (SoS). The Arrowhead Framework supports local cloud functionalities for automation applications, provided by means of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), by offering a number of services that ease application development. On such applications the QoS guarantees are required for service fruition, and are themselves requested as services from the framework. To fulfil this objective we start by describing the Arrowhead architecture and the components needed to dynamically in run-time negotiate a system configuration that guarantees the QoS requirements between application services.

Abstract
Modern distributed real-time embedded applications have high processing requirements associated with strict deadlines. For some applications, such constraints cannot be fulfilled by existing single-core embedded platforms. A solution is to parallelize the execution of the applications, by allowing networked nodes to distribute their workload to remote nodes with spare capacity. In that context, this paper presents a holistic timing analysis for fixedpriority fork-join parallel/distributed tasks. Furthermore, we extend the holistic approach to consider the interaction between parallel threads and messages interchanged through a flexible time triggered switched Ethernet network, and we show how the pessimism on the worst case response time computation of such tasks can be reduced by considering the pipeline effect that occurs in such distributed systems. To evaluate the performance and correctness of the holistic model, this paper includes a numerical evaluation based on a real automotive application. The obtained results show that the proposed method is effective in distributing the load by different nodes, allowing a significant reduction of the worst case response time of the tasks. Moreover, the paper also reports an implementation of the model on a Linux library, called parallel/distributed real-time, as well as the corresponding results obtained on a real testbed. The obtained results are in accordance with the predictions of the holistic timing analysis.