Special Sessions-Predictable Timing Behavior in Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems

Ensuring predictable and deterministic behavior in distributed cyber-physical systems (CPS) is essential for guaranteeing safety, reliability, and real-time behavior. However, achieving this predictability is challenging due to network uncertainties, asynchronous execution, and complex timing interactions.This manuscript is based on a special session at Embedded Systems Week (ESWeek) 2025, which brings together experts to explore in four presentations how this uncertainty can be addressed and how to introduce additional determinism into the system to achieve predictable timing behavior in distributed CPS.We begin by exploring cornerstones of timing analysis techniques to provide end-to-end latency guarantees for distributed systems (Chen and Günzel). Next, we discuss design strategies for meeting timing constraints, focusing on how system parameters influence cause-effect chains and how these parameters can be tuned to ensure predictable behavior in industrial automation settings (Dasari and Becker). We then turn to approaches to achieve more predictable system behavior. To that end, we examine deterministic semantic models for distributed systems that enable the design of robust and fault-tolerant systems (Lee). Finally, we discuss how solving constraints for scheduling cause-effect chains can be used to enforce strict timing guarantees and improve predictability (Bourke).