There were a number of very interesting papers and presentations. Iain Bate from University of York gave a talk on "A framework for scheduling in safety-critical embedded control systems". He emphasized the importance of finding good methods for translating between control theory concept and scheduling attributes. Another great paper was Luca Abeni's "Adaptive Bandwidth Reservation for Multimedia Computing". He is a PhD student of Buttazzo at Scula Superiore in Pisa and his work is closely related to the ARTES project on "Integrated Control and Scheduling". It was also interesting to listen to the presentation of the "Utilization Bound Revisited" by Chen, Mok and Kuo from University of Texas, Austin.

The three invited speakers were Wolfgang Halang, K. Ramamritham and K-G Shin. Wolfgang Halang stated that both the past and the present of real-time control systems belong to the IEC-1131 standard. The simpler, the better. He did not believe that formal method would ever result in in any useful verification of embedded systems. He gave some great quotes during his talk that are worth remembering. He said that "Complexity is a bureaucratic tool for dictatorship" and "Evolution goes from the primitive via the complex to the simple."

Ramamritham's talk was in the use of off-the-shelf components in real-time systems. His conclusion was that it was possible to use NT in a real-time if your were careful and did not overload the CPU. The Wednesday speaker was K.G. Shin who presented his small real-time kernel Emerald. The talk was mostly about implementation details of the ready queue sorting, semaphores, etc.

The overall impression of the conference was fairly good. There were many interesting talks and especially the big Swedish troop did a good job in presenting its material. For me and Anton down at the control department in Lund, it is always good to meet with the other real-time people in Sweden. This does not happen as often as one could expect since we are a bit off both technically and geographically.

Submitted: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 14:39
By: Johan Eker <johane@control.lth.se>
At: Lunds tekniska högskola