Travel Report from RTAS 2001

Lars Albertsson
Swedish Institute of Computer Science
lalle@sics.se

27 July 2001

The seventh IEEE Real-Time Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2001) was held May 30 to June 1 in Taipei, Taiwan. I had received a travel grant from the ARTES mobility to visit this conference, which is one of the main annual events in real-time research. The main reason for my attending the conference was to hold a presentation in the work in progress session.

The quality of the conference was similar to last year; some papers were of high quality and interesting, but most were bland, or not within my field of interest. I appreciated a few presentation on soft real-time systems, for example a paper by Miyoshi and Rajkumar, who presented resource control lists, a method for assigning resource reservations to processes. This is a continuation on their good work in resource kernels, and the design was implemented in Linux/RK. I also found a theoretical paper by Tarek Abdelzaher to be interesting. He generalised Liu's and Layland's fundamental theories on scheduling and utilisation bounds to include aperiodic tasks. This paper may very well be frequently cited in future real-time publications.

Overall, I find that RTAS does not focus on theoretical an scheduling research, instead focusing on soft real-time and quality of service support in general-purpose environments. I therefore serves as a much needed complement to more theoretically oriented real-time forums.

The arrangements around the conference were good, although the keynote speakers were not that interesting. I appreciated that an internet connection was provided this year. The conference program also included a guided tour to a museum. Apart from that, Taipei is not very interesting to tourists, and almost completely lacks cultural and historical attractions.

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