This book gives an overview of the cross-domain component-based architecture GENESYS that is a candidate for the ARTEMIS European Reference Architecture for embedded systems. Such a cross-domain approach is needed to support the coming Internet of Things, to take full advantage of the economies of scale and to improve productivity. GENESYS supports complexity management through the straightforward composition of systems out of components. As the foundation for robustness, GENESYS supports fault isolation, the selective restart of components after transient faults, and active redundancy. Security is addressed at all levels of the architecture. Energy efficiency is enabled through integrated resource management that permits to individually reduce the power-requirements of components. GENESYS is a platform architecture with a minimal set of core services and a plurality of optional services that are predominantly implemented as self-contained system components. Choosing a suitable set of these system components that implement optional services, augmented by application specific components, can generate domain-specific instantiations of the architecture.