WATERS 2014 - Call for papers [txt]

The objective of the WATERS workshop series is to discuss and give visibility to tools, best practices and methodologies intended for the assessment and validation of software and system architecture and design intents in all areas of embedded and real-time computing systems. The scope of the workshop ranges from formal or algorithmic analysis-based methods to simulation and trace-based profiling, as well as from high-level architectures or design models to concrete implementations.

Much like any other endeavor disciplined by the scientific method, research in the workshop themes requires reproducibility for the adoption of techniques and the comparison of results claimed by proponents. WATERS offers the community of researchers and industrial practitioners an open space for presenting novel results, sharing best practices, and providing feedback on tools, frameworks, reusable data sets, code artifacts, behavioral models developed in research initiatives. Realistic industrial use cases are especially welcome, in that they can constitute common metrics, and in the longer run, possibly benchmarks, for evaluating experimental results obtained in research efforts across industry and academia.

Focus of the 2014 Edition

Timing predictability and performance are key issues in the design of real-time and embedded systems. These concerns involve more than timing, and entail the accounting and management of multiple resources and extra-functional characteristics, like memory, energy, and temperature.

One distinctly major challenge that real-time and embedded system practitioners currently face is the predictable, resource efficient and complexity controlled use of modern multi-core processors. That challenge is compounded by the objective of allowing applications with different levels of criticality to be deployed on those new systems.

WATERS 2014 focuses on tools, benchmarks, and data sets that can support comprehensive analysis and evaluation of concrete, industrial systems where any of the above challenges are addressed in an integrated way.

The authors of accepted papers will have the opportunity of showing demonstrations of their work in a dedicated hands-on session at the workshop.
A booth will also be installed at the main conference reception, where demonstrations and material can be made available to all ECRTS 2014 participants, thus much beyond the workshop own attendance.
All prospective authors are much encouraged to consider this double opportunity.

Scope

The workshop seeks original contributions on methods and tools for real-time and embedded systems analysis, simulation, modelling and benchmarking. We seek papers describing well-engineered, highly reusable, possibly open, tools, methodologies, and data sets that can be used by other researchers.

Areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

• Modelling, analysis and simulation of, possibly mixed-criticality, real-time, distributed, and embedded systems running on multi-core, many-core, massively parallel, or distributed systems
• Modelling, analysis and simulation of the various components of the run-time environment, including the operating system, the hypervisor, or complex middleware components
• Tools and methods for the analysis of real-time systems
• Instrumentation, tracing methods and overhead analysis, including proper accounting of the overheads due to various virtualization technologies
• Power consumption models and experimental data for real-time power-aware systems
• Simulation, instrumentation and analysis of complex distributed systems infrastructures such as Cloud Computing infrastructures, when supporting real-time and QoS-aware applications
• Realistic case studies and reusable data sets
• Comparative evaluation of existing algorithms and techniques

Submission of papers

Submitted papers should follow the IEEE conference format (2 columns, 10 pt, single-line spacing) and should not exceed 6 pages in length. Papers may be submitted in either PDF or Postscript format through the softconf on-line system. The papers will be reviewed by the workshop Program Committee. All accepted papers will be made available to all participants one week before the workshop so that contributions can be examined prior to the event.

By submitting a paper, the authors agree and confirm that: neither this paper nor a version close to it is under submission or will be submitted elsewhere before notification by WATERS 2014, and if accepted, at least one author will register for WATERS 2014 by the special registration deadline set in the notification of acceptance, and present the paper at the workshop in person.

Special issue of Elsevier JSA

The best papers from the workshop plan to be invited for being submitted in extended form to a special issue of the Elsevier Journal of Systems Architecture. The extended papers will undergo a new peer-reviewing process.