Abstract
The report on Software for Dependable Systems: Sufficient Evidence? [Jac07] by the National Academies contains as one of its central recommendations: One key to achieving dependability at reasonable cost is a serious and sustained commitment to simplicity, including simplicity of critical functions and simplicity in system interactions. This commitment is often the mark of true expertise. We consider simplicity to be the antonym of cognitive complexity (in the rest of this book, we mean cognitive complexity whenever we use the word complexity). In everyday life, many embedded systems seem to move in the opposite direction. The ever-increasing demands on the functionality and the nonfunctional constraints (such as safety, security, or energy consumption) that must be satisfied by embedded systems lead to a growth in system complexity.
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Kopetz, H., Steiner, W. (2022). Simplicity. In: Real-Time Systems. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-11992-7_2
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