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Travel Report from ECRTS'01

Travel Report from ECRTS'01

Jan Carlson
Mälardalen University, Sweden

June 27, 2001

Location
The 13th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems was held in Delft, The Netherlands, June 13-15, 2001. The town of Delft is located between Rotterdam and Den Haag, and feels very much like a typical Dutch town, at least to a foreigner. One quickly learns not to refer to locations as "close to the canal", since there are at least ten of them within the city centre. Despite the modest size, Delft has a large technical university, which was where the conference was held.

The Conference
My main motivation for attending the conference was to present a paper at the work-in-progress session. Also, I expected to broaden my knowledge of real-time related issues, and since this was my first conference, to just watch and learn what a conference is like.

In general, I found the sessions interesting and well presented. The most interesting presentation, and in my opinion the most substantial contribution to the real-time field, was given by Enrico Bini in the second scheduling session. It was titled A Hyperbolic Bound for the Rate Monotonic Algorithm and presented a new way of verifying the feasibility of task sets under the rate monotonic algorithm. The new method has the same complexity as the well know Liu-Layland method, but less pessimistic.

The two sessions that I originally thought I would find most interesting were Design and Formal Systems. Both of these turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment, partly because of the quality of the presentations and partly because the addressed issues was not within my main field of interest. Still, I quite liked the description of MAST, a model for representing temporal elements of real-time applications. Another interesting presentation, titled Test Generation for Time Critical Systems: Tool and Case Study, described how a formal specification of a system can be used to automatically generate good test cases.

As a conclusion, I feel that I learned a lot from the conference, not so much from the details of the presented papers, but rather from the conference as a whole. It gave some insights to what issues are currently the important ones in real-time research, and it also provided some interesting ideas and many valuable contacts for my future work. This document as pdf, ps.

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