Abstract
The eleven papers in this special section focus on industrial communication systems and technologies (ICS). Major requirements of the ICS are real-time support and dependability under all considered load and fault assumptions. The ICS may need to meet stringent deadlines as a basis for the stability in control loops and alarm monitoring. At the same time, high reliability and availability is demanded to avoid down times. In particular, reliability with respect to critical failure modes is of utmost importance for safety-critical applications where failures may result in significant financial losses or risk to humans and the environment. From the point of view of the information and communication technology (ICT), current ICS solutions are based on wired systems to support distributed industrial controls.