Workshops

Embedded and cyber-physical systems design requires multidisciplinary skills from control and signal processing theory, electronics, computer engineering and science, telecommunication, etc., as well as application domain knowledge. Demand for embedded systems engineers has motivated a growing interest in the question of educating specialists in this domain. As system designs grow more complex and the time to market diminishes, quality education becomes more and more important. This sixth workshop on the subject aims to bring researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to assess needs and share design, research, and experiences in embedded and cyber-physical systems education.

Reliable WCET bounds are a necessary component for the construction and verification of dependable real-time systems. They are an input for doing task CPU allocation, creating task schedules, and performing schedulability analysis.

ReCoSoC is an informal workshop aiming to encourage technical and scientific exchanges between senior academics and young researchers in the area of reconfigurable and communication-centric systems-on-chip.

In 2012, ReCoSoC will be held at the historic city of York, United Kingdom. Workshop sessions will be held at the newly inaugurated Heslington East campus of the University of York.

The objective of this workshop is to present ongoing industrial/academic current work on the modelling and analysis of real time and embedded systems. A particular attention will be given on successful stories in the integration and assessment on the exploitation of R&D improvements on industrial designs. Partners from collaborative projects are solicited to present industrial experiences of collaborations with tools providers and academics.

The purpose of the conference is to bring together leading researchers from the adaptive hardware and systems community to exchange experiences and share new ideas in the field. The conference expands the topics addressed by the precursor series of NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware, held between 1999 and 2005, with a broader scope. This includes a variety of hardware and system adaptation methods and targeting more industry participation. The NASA/ESA series started with the AHS-2006 conference held in Istanbul, Turkey, and continued annually with AHS-2007 conference held in Edinburgh, UK, AHS-2008 conference held in Noordwijk, The Netherlands, AHS-2009 conference held in San Francisco, USA, AHS-2010 conference held in Anaheim, USA, and AHS-2011 conference held in San Diego, USA.

Adaptation reflects the capability of a system to maintain or improve its performance in the context of internal or external changes, such as uncertainties and variations during fabrication, faults and degradations, modifications in the operational environment, incidental or intentional interference, different users and preferences, modifications of standards and requirements, trade-offs between performance and resources.

ICE 2012 – 5th Interaction and Concurrency Experience Topic: Distributed coordination, execution models, and resilient interaction

Interaction and Concurrency Experiences (ICEs) is a series of international scientific meetings oriented to researchers in various fields of theoretical computer science. The timeliness and novelty of these events relies both on the variety of the topics that will be treated on each event and on the adopted paper selection mechanism.

The workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES) and the workshop on Mapping of Applications to MPSoCs (Map2MPSoC) will organize a joint Map2MPSoC/SCOPES workshop in 2012.

The Map2MPSoC/SCOPES workshop will feature a combination of research papers and research presentations (details see below). The research papers will also be published in the ACM digital library. The workshop will be held in cooperation with ACM SIGBED and EDAA.

The workshop structure (presentations followed by intensive discussions) allows for an interactive atmosphere in which industrial and academic representatives can exchange new ideas and trends in the area multi-processor mapping and code generation.

Smart spaces, pervasive computing and ambient intelligence are different terms to allude to the capabilities of systems to ’adapt’ and ’respond’, in order to provide the right service in a timely, unobtrusive and friendly manner. When conceiving a smart system, it is key to define how to seamlessly, effectively and securely it will interact with the user, both to gather the appropriate information to work and to provide the required service. To date, most practical interaction strategies in smart spaces have relied in the use of mobile devices as mediators (e.g. mobile augmented reality). Recently also a number of methods based on natural interfaces (such as tangible ones in smart objects) have been proposed and demonstrated. This workshop focuses on advances in technologies and concepts enabling novel interaction models to link the physical and virtual world layers in smart spaces, to create innovative applications which make intensive use of ambient and personal information to deliver value to their users. Our goal is to organize a forum for attendees to share experiences and discuss novel ideas for easy, friendly and effective interaction and applications in smart spaces.

The increasing complexity and distribution of real-time embedded systems, which triggered the advent of cyber-physical systems, the use of timing analysis techniques needs to be put forward as much as possible in the flow, using them as an aid to the design and changing the perspective: from the analysis of a given configuration to the synthesis of an optimal design. Developers are today increasingly faced with design problems, including the optimal placement of functions, the optimal assignment of priorities (or time slots) to tasks and messages and the optimal packing of communication signals in frames. Because of the extremely large design space, a trial-and-error approach , in which a configuration is manually defined, then analyzed for schedulability and then possibly improved or fixed is no more practical and synthesis and optimization methods are needed. The problem is of course relevant also for purely hardware (or programmable hardware) embedded designs, where the need for design synthesis has been established for quite some time now.

Along the past decades, several network communication protocols have been developed with new capabilities, from an ever increasing throughput and support for traffic classes (including guaranteed latency and jitter), to different topologies, integration of heterogeneous segments, extensive use of wireless technologies, openness to dynamic arrival and departures of nodes, openness to larger networks (such as the Internet), etc. If, on one hand, many problems have been solved, with a significant number of successful real-time embedded applications that rely on networking services, on the other hand new problems appeared, or some old problems persist, that still require adequate solutions for harmonization with real-time constraints, e.g., energy-efficient communication (particularly in WSN), networks for nodes with scarce resources, scalability issues in large sensor systems, networking support to middleware and to Quality-of-Service (QoS) adaptation and graceful degradation, support to higher software integration and transition to wireless communication everywhere.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based software engineering for real-time embedded systems. We are seeking contributions relating to this subject at different levels, from modelling languages and semantics to concrete application experiments, from model analysis techniques to model-based implementation and deployment. Given the criticality of the application domain, we particularly focus on model-based approaches yielding efficient and provably correct designs. Concerning models and languages, we welcome contributions presenting novel modelling approaches as well as contributions evaluating existing ones.

An increasing amount of software is not written manually any more. Rather, software is synthesized from abstract models of the required functionality. As a result, the effort of generating software is reduced and software verification typically becomes easier.
 Software synthesis has been implemented in various disperse communities. The workshop aims at bringing the software generation and software synthesis communities together and at identifying research problems which should be addressed by the scientific community.

As embedded system designs grow more complex and the time to market diminishes, quality embedded systems education becomes more and more important. This fifth workshop on the subject aims to bring researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to assess needs and share design, research, and experiences in embedded systems education.

Interest in real-time Java in both the research community and industry has recently increased significantly, because of its challenges and its potential impact on the development of embedded and real-time applications. The goal of the proposed workshop is to gather researchers working on real-time and embedded Java to identify the challenging problems that still need to be solved in order to assure the success of real-time Java as a technology, and to report results and experiences gained by researchers.

The 15th International Real-Time Ada Workshop (IRTAW-15) will take place on September 14-16 of 2011 in Liébana (Cantabria), Spain, a nice mountain area by the "Picos de Europa" National Park.

The ambitious goal of the International Workshop on Anaysis Tools and Methodologies for Embedded and Real-time Systems is to start creating a common ground and a community to collect methodologies, software tools, best practices, data sets, application models, benchmarks and any other way to improve comparability of results in the current practice of research in real-time and embedded systems. People from industry are welcome to contribute as well with realistic data or methods coming from their own experience.

Reliable WCET bounds are a necessary component for the construction and verification of dependable real-time systems. They are an input for doing task CPU allocation, creating task schedules, and performing schedulability analysis.

14th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems SCOPES focuses on the software generation process for modern embedded systems. Topics of interest include all aspects of the compilation process, starting with suitable modeling and specification techniques and programming languages for embedded systems. The emphasis of the workshop lies on code generation techniques for embedded processors. The exploitation of specialized instruction set characteristics is as important as the development of new optimizations for embedded application domains. Cost criteria for the entire code generation and optimization process include runtime, timing predictability, energy dissipation, code size and others. Since today’s embedded devices frequently consist of a multi-processor system-on-chip, the scope of this workshop is not limited to single-processor systems but particularly covers compilation techniques for MPSoC architectures.

The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum for brainstorming and road-mapping the future of mapping applications to MPSoCs. Knowledge about constraints and directions for future MPSoC architectures should be collected. Existing mapping techniques should be briefly presented and analyzed. Directions for future research should be proposed and evaluated.

The UML and formal methods communities have been working for a number of years to produce a practical (via UML) and rigorous (via formal methods) approach to software engineering.

Interaction and Concurrency Experiences (ICEs) is intended as a series of international scientific meetings oriented to researchers in various fields of theoretical computer science. The timeliness and novelty of these events relies both on the variety of the topics that will be treated on each event and on the adopted paper selection mechanism.

Sixth IEEE International workshop UML and AADL

Adaptive embedded systems can respond to environmental changes including hardware/software defects, resource changes, and non-continual feature usage. As such, adaptive systems can extend the area of operations and improve efficiency in the use of system resources. However, adaptability also incurs overhead in terms of system complexity and resource requirements. For example, an adaptive system requires some means for reconfiguration. These means and their mechanisms introduce additional complexity to the design and the architecture of the system, at the same time require additional resources such as computation, power, and communication bandwidth. Consequently, adaptive systems must be diligently planned, designed, analyzed, and built to find the right tradeoffs between flexibility and complexity.

The objective of the workshop is to discuss new methodologies for the rigorous design of embedded systems. Through a series of invited talks, the workshop will survey some of the challenges and emerging approaches in the area. A series of design flows will be presented. The workshop will mainly discuss performance analysis, correctness (high confidence and security), code generation, and modeling aspects (including timed scheduling and software/hardware interactions). Those concepts shall be illustrated with examples coming from the aeronautic, automotive, and robotic areas. Interactions between industrials and academic researchers will be facilitated through a series of open discussion sessions (maybe an interaction between theoretical and more practical presentations).

Workshop on Rigorous Systems Engineering: We plan to have one workshop-internal tutorial respectively invited talk on a practically successful technique in rigorous systems engineering. Another important goal of the workshop is to expose systems researchers to the new generation of formal verification tools, which scale to realistic systems and have been proven to produce better systems faster. Thus we will also have a second workshop-internal tutorial on new formal techniques applicable to systems research.

The MoBE-RTES workshop is based on the premise that successful development of complex real-time and embedded systems necessarily requires careful architectural design and that this, in turn, involves the extensive use of models, modelling tools, and model-based development methods. Consequently, the focus of the workshop is on contributions that describe theorical and/or empirical advances in model-based engineering of RTES.

The PPES workshop is concerned with critical hard real-time systems that have to satisfy both efficiency and predictability requirements. For example, an electronic controller for a safety-critical system in an automobile needs to react not only correctly to external inputs such as rapid deceleration or loss of grip, but also provably within a given time-span. Although there exist techniques to accurately predict the worst-case execution time of critical embedded systems for complex microprocessors, the current approaches will not scale to future systems. The trend of integrating multiple functions on a single control unit or to use multi-core systems with shared resources saves costs, but introduces lots of interferences between tasks and components.

The main objective of this Workshop was to discuss existing models of real-time systems that focus on representing the timing behaviour and requirements from the perspective of the ability to use schedulability analysis tools. By discussing the limitations of existing models it is possible to propose extensions that can fill the gaps that are required to cover state-of-the-art hardware platforms, operating systems, and scheduling techniques used in practice to develop real-time applications. The results of the workshop will influence a new model, called MAST-2, that tries to enhance the modelling capabilities that are currently present in MAST. They will also contribute to the future evolution of the MARTE UML profile for real-time and embedded systems.

In embedded systems, controlling a shared resource like the bus, or improving a property like power consumption, may be hard to achieve when programming device drivers individually. There is a need for global resource control, taking decisions based on a centralized view of the devices’ states. In this presentation, we study power consumption in sensor networks, where the nodes are small embedded systems powered by batteries. We concentrate on the hardware/software architecture of a node, where significant gains can be achieved by controlling the consumption modes of the various devices globally. The architecture we propose involves a simple adaptation of the application level, to communicate with the hardware via a control layer. The control layer itself is built from a set of simple automata: the drivers of the devices, whose states correspond to power consumption modes, and a controller that enforces global properties. All these automata are programmed using a synchronous language, whose compiler performs static scheduling and produces a single piece of C code. We explain the approach in details, demonstrate its use with either Contiki or a traditional multithreading operating system, and report on our experiments.

The CRTS workshop provides a forum for researchers and technologists to discuss the state-of-the-art, present their works and contributions, and set future directions in compositional technology for real-time embedded systems.

Synchronous languages form a distinctive branch of Concurrency Theory. They are based on simple ideas of discrete logical time, explicit parallelism/concurrency and joint discrete reactions as operational behaviours. Their striking features is that such notions are provided to the plain designer him/herself, so that precise timing and time handling is seen as an integral part of functional design, not an extra-functional analysis and simulation afterthought addendum.

The UML and formal methods communities have been working for a number of years to produce a practical (via UML) and rigorous (via formal methods) approach to software engineering.

UML is the de facto standard for modelling various aspects of software systems in both industry and academia, despite the inconvenience that its current specification is complex and its syntax imprecise. This third workshop will encourage new initiatives of building bridges between informal, semi-formal and formal notations.

An increasing amount of software is not written manually any more. Rather, software is synthesized from abstract models of the required functionality. As a result, the effort of generating software is reduced and software verification typically becomes easier.
 Software synthesis has been implemented in various disperse communities. The workshop aims at bringing the software generation and software synthesis communities together and at identifying research problems which should be addressed by the scientific community.

As embedded system designs grow more complex and the time to market diminishes, quality embedded systems education becomes more and more important. This fifth workshop on the subject aims to bring researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to assess needs and share design, research, and experiences in embedded systems education.

The workshop aims to discuss recent results on component-based design with emphasis on design frameworks for real-time systems encompassing heterogeneous composition and models of computation. The focus is not only on fundamental results but also on their implementation in methods and tools and their concrete application in areas such as automotive, avionics, consumer electronics and automation.

RoSym 2010 is an international workshop focused on model based engineering (MBE) for the development of robotics systems.

In Conjunction with MODELS 2010 Conference

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based software engineering for real-time embedded systems. We are seeking contributions relating to this subject at different levels, from modelling languages and semantics to concrete application experiments, from model analysis techniques to model-based implementation and deployment. Given the criticality of the application domain, we particularly focus on model-based approaches yielding efficient and provably correct designs. Concerning models and languages, we welcome contributions presenting novel modelling approaches as well as contributions evaluating existing ones.

FIT stands for Foundations of Interface Technologies. Component-based design is widely considered as a major approach to developing systems in a time and cost effective way. Central in this approach is the notion of an interface. Interfaces summarize the externally visible properties of a component and are seen as a key to achieving component interoperability and to predict global system behavior based on the component behavior. To capture the intricacy of complex software products, rich interfaces have been proposed. These interfaces do not only specify syntactic properties, such as the signatures of methods and operations, but also take into account behavioral and extra-functional properties, such as quality of service, security and dependability. Rich interfaces have been proposed for describing, e.g., the legal sequences of messages or method calls accepted by components, or the resource and timing constraints in embedded software. The development of a rigorous framework for the specification and analysis of rich interfaces is challenging. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers who are interested in the formal underpinnings of interface technologies.

Reliable WCET bounds are a necessary component for the construction and verification of dependable real-time systems. They are an input for doing task CPU allocation, creating task schedules, and performing schedulability analysis.

Developers of Real-Time Operating Systems (RTOS) are faced with many challenges arising from two opposing needs: extreme optimisation of resource usage (processor, energy, network bandwidth, etc.) and dynamic configuration, flexible scheduling, component-based development and deployment, etc. While real-time systems continue to be used in many small embedded applications, real-time services are being introduced and used in general-purpose operating systems. Notable examples are the various flavours of Linux that provide support to time-sensitive applications.

Research in real-time systems has gone very far from the initial seminal papers back in the 70s. Many algorithms, design methodologies, techniques and tools have been proposed, spanning several application areas, from RTOS to distributed systems, from safety critical to soft real-time systems. However, unlike other research areas (e.g., networking) there are no widely recognized reference tools or methodologies for comparing different research works in the area.

The aim of the workshop is to provide a forum for brainstorming and road-mapping the future of mapping applications to MPSoCs. Knowledge about constraints and directions for future MPSoC architectures should be collected. Existing mapping techniques should be briefly presented and analyzed. Directions for future research should be proposed and evaluated.

13th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems SCOPES focuses on the software generation process for modern embedded systems. Topics of interest include all aspects of the compilation process, starting with suitable modeling and specification techniques and programming languages for embedded systems. The emphasis of the workshop lies on code generation techniques for embedded processors. The exploitation of specialized instruction set characteristics is as important as the development of new optimizations for embedded application domains. Cost criteria for the entire code generation and optimization process include runtime, timing predictability, energy dissipation, code size and others. Since today’s embedded devices frequently consist of a multi-processor system-on-chip, the scope of this workshop is not limited to single-processor systems but particularly covers compilation techniques for MPSoC architectures.

Combinatorial Optimization for Embedded System Design

The diffusion of embedded computing systems has grown in the last decade to almost reach ubiquity. From mobile phones and TV to cars and dishwashers, all electrically powered devices we commonly use everyday are digitally controlled by a programmable system. Over 99% of the microprocessors produced today are used in embedded systems, and quite recently the number of embedded systems in use has become larger than the number of humans on the planet. In parallel, a similarly wide technological leap sets new design challenges and new opportunities to exploit advanced combinatorial optimization methods.

Hybrid optimization methods, in particular, are a perfect candidate to deal with the detailed and complex problems involved in the design of modern systems and applications. This workshop represents an occasion to bring the world of digital system design closer to that of combinatorial optimization; such a meeting presents the chance to tackle new interesting problems, to devise and apply algorithmic methods and to disclose broad economic opportunities.

Interaction and Concurrency Experiences (ICEs) is intended as a series of international scientific meetings oriented to researchers in various fields of theoretical computer science. The timeliness and novelty of these events relies both on the variety of the topics that will be treated on each event and on the adopted paper selection mechanism.

Every experience will focus on a different specific topic which affects several areas of computer science. A thorough scientific debate among PC and authors of submitted papers will parallel the reviewing process. After the paper selection phase, papers will be published on the web and the discussion will be extended to perspective participants. The debates are meant to improve both the quality of the accepted papers and the reviewing process. Also, it will prepare and stimulate the scientific discussions during the event.

Formalisms for Embedded Systems Architecture description & visualization:
 What key formalisms, ADL’s and visual languages, for design of embedded systems are there and what are the trends?
 What is the maturity (languages, tools) and industrial adoption of such formalisms?
 What are the key outstanding research issues to pave way for larger scale industrial adoption?

The focus of WARM is software-based approaches to adaptive resource management for soft or adaptive embedded real-time applications, e.g., multimedia applications or non-safety critical control applications. Special emphasis will be given to multi-resource management, in particular including CPU time and power consumption. Special emphasis will also be given to multi-core platforms.

Due to the even more increased complexity of distributed, real-time and embedded systems (DRE), the need for a model-driven approach is more obvious in this domain than in monolithic RT systems. The purpose of this workshop is to provide an opportunity to gather researchers and industrial practitioners to survey existing efforts related to behaviour modelling and model-based analysis of DRE systems. We will address all aspects of the representation, analysis, and implementation of Distributed, Real-time and Embedded systems (DRE) system behaviour and/or architecture models.

UML is the de facto standard for modelling various aspects of software systems in both industry and academia, despite the inconvenience that its current specification is complex and its syntax imprecise.

The goal of this workshop is to strengthen the connections between academic research and industry, or to be more precise, to increase the understanding in the academic world of industrial issues in embedded systems engineering and together come to a shared agreement on research directions that seem worthwhile to pursue. The speakers at the workshop work at different medical companies or are participants in the ArtistDesign network with extensive experience in healthcare.

The workshop aims at bringingthe software generation and software synthesis communities together and at identifying research problems which should be addressed by the scientific community.

As embedded system designs grow more complex and the time to market diminishes, quality embedded systems education becomes more and more important. This fifth workshop on the subject aims to bring researchers, educators, and industrial representatives together to assess needs and share design, research, and experiences in embedded systems education.

The NWPT series of annual workshops is a forum bringing together programming theorists from the Nordic and Baltic countries (but also elsewhere)

Adaptive systems can respond to environmental changes including hardware/software defects, resource changes, and non-continual feature usage. As such, adaptive systems can extend the area of operations and improve efficiency in the use of system resources. However, adaptability also incurs overhead in terms of system complexity and resource requirements. The purpose of the workshop is to discuss new and on-going research that is centered on the idea of adaptability as first class citizen and consider the involved tradeoffs.

The focus of the workshop is on energy efficiency as an alternative source of energy. Data shows that alternative energy sources alone are insufficient to meet the increasing demand. Higher efficiency is therefore required to address the energy problem, and is important also from an environmental point of view. Emphasis will be on addressing the problem from a system standpoint.

For over 20 years the series of International Real-Time Ada Workshop meetings has provided a forum for identifying issues with real-time system support in Ada and for exploring possible approaches and solutions, and has attracted participation from key members of the research, user, and implementer communities worldwide.

The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in model-based software engineering for real-time embedded systems. We are seeking contributions relating to this subject at different levels, from modelling languages and semantics to concrete application experiments, from model analysis techniques to model-based implementation and deployment. Given the criticality of the application domain, we particularly focus on model-based approaches yielding efficient and provably correct designs. Concerning models and languages, we welcome contributions presenting novel modelling approaches as well as contributions evaluating existing ones.