1. Adaptivity in Professional Printing Systems

There is a constant pressure on developers of embedded systems to simultaneously increase system functionality and to decrease development costs. Aviable way to obtain a better system performance with the same physical hardware is adaptivity: a system should be able to adapt itself to dynamically changing circumstances. The development of adaptive embedded systems has been the topic of the Octopus project, an industry-as-laboratory project of the Embedded Systems Institute, with the professional printer domain of Océ-Technologies B.V.as an industrial carrier. The project has resulted in techniques and tools for model-based development of adaptive embedded systems including component-level and system-level control strategies, system architecting tools, and automatic generation of system software. This introductory chapter presents the Octopus project and provides a reading guide for this book, which presents the results of the Octopus project.