The 5th IFAC Workshop on Algorithms and Architectures for Real-Time Control (AARTC '98) was organized under the auspices of the IFAC Technical Committee. This Committee is concerned with the use of emerging software and hardware developments in real-time control. The AARTC '98 Technical Programme consisted of seventeen sessions, covering major areas of software, hardware and applications for real-time control, namely robotics, modeling and control, software design tools and methodologies, industrial process control and manufacturing systems, parallel and distributed systems, non-linear control systems, neural networks, parallel and distributed algorithms for real-time signal processing and control, transport applications, algorithms, fault tolerant systems and fuzzy control. The contributions were selected from a large number of high-quality full draft papers and late breaking paper contributions presenting very recent research work.