The Portuguese Society for Automatic Control hosted the IFAC Workshop on Algorithms and Architecture for Real-Time Control (AARTC '97), which was held at Vilamoura, Portugal. Six papers are selected by the International Program Committee as examples of the research described at the meeting. The first two papers address hardware issues in parallel and distributed computing. The second pair of papers concerns robotic applications. The last pair of papers describe practical methods for real-time process control and estimation.