Real-Time Systems 08

Welcome to the home page of the course on real-time systems.

The course aims to give students a broad foundation in dependability and real-time systems, such that they are well equipped to plan, design and implement software for embedded applications, where dependability and proper handling of real-time aspects are critical for the success of the software.

Place and Time

Cassiopia 0.2.12, Tuesday 12:30 - 14:15

Lectures

Consultations

Literature

We shall read the book Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages by Alan Burns and Andy Wellings. It is third edition of a text aimed at mature students. The book gives a broad coverage of its theme and encourages the reader to understand underlying concepts by treating real-time aspects in three different programming languages or environments. It touches also on many related topics from design, over dependability to operating systems. During the course, I hope that such material will help to consolidate what the students have learnt in more specialized courses on these topics. The book

Alan Burns and Andy Wellings.
Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages (3rd edition)
Pearson Education Ltd., 2001,
ISBN 0-201-72988-1.

is available in the University Bookstore. There is a companion website with supplementary material. For more material on operating systems, take a look at Real-Time Linux Foundation, Java Real Time, or Ravenscar.

Evaluation

The evaluation consists in turning in a short essay (3 to 5 pages) about dependability or real-time aspects of your semester project. We find the exact topic during consultations.

The deadline for the essay is the same as for your project, and you can choose to incorporate it as an identifiable section of your project report. The report shall be turned in (together with the project report) to your semester secretary.

A separate report shall contain a short introduction to the software developed in your project; a discussion of the relevance of the various real-time or dependability aspects, the main impairments that you foresee, and the means that you use to avoid them (BW Ch. 5). When you discuss means for improving dependability, you may benefit from studying the chapters in BW on Exception Handling (Ch. 6), Atomic Actions (Ch. 10), Resource Control (Ch. 11) or Scheduling (Ch. 13).

Version: 2008-01-29