Book excerpt: The IFIP TC-10 Working Conference on Distributed and Parallel Embedded Systems (DIPES 2004) brings together experts from industry and academia to discuss recent developments in this important and growing field in the splendid city of Toulouse, France. The ever decreasing price/performance ratio of microcontrollers makes it economically attractive to replace more and more conventional mechanical or electronic control systems within many products by embedded real-time computer systems. An embedded real-time computer system is always part of a well-specified larger system, which we call an intelligent product. Although most intelligent products start out as stand-alone units, many of them are required to interact with other systems at a later stage. At present, many industries are in the middle of this transition from stand-alone products to networked embedded systems. This transition requires reflection and architecting: The complexity of the evolving distributed artifact can only be controlled, if careful planning and principled design methods replace the - hoc engineering of the first version of many standalone embedded products.