Abstract

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Guideline proposals for a European curriculum on Embedded Software and Systems

Paul Caspi, VERIMAG, France

To appear at Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS03), Porto, Portugal, 2-4 July 2003

Bio

Paul Caspi is "docteur ès sciences" in automatic control, and "directeur de recherche" at the Verimag laboratory in Grenoble. His domain of interest is computer science applied to automatic control. He is mainly concerned with safety problems in critical applications, from both hardware and software points of view. This has led him to be involved in the design of Lustre, a data-flow programming language for safety-critical automatic control applications.

He also served as a consultant for several French companies and administrations, on problems related to safety-critical computing systems.

His present research domain deals with synchrony and the relationships between synchrony and asynchrony. This has led him to study distributed implementations of synchronous programs, from both theoretical and practical points of view.

Abstract

This presentation reflects the activities of the ARTIST network of excellence concerning European education on embedded software and systems. The state of the art in the domain exhibits a large diversity of approaches, mostly led by application fields : automotive, space, avionics, industrial control, telecoms, consumer electronics,... This diversity shows, in some sense, the lack of maturity of the domain and is also visible in education and research. This leads us to recommend a graduate curriculum which emphasises:

    - the coexistence of courses on signal processing, control and computing theory,

    - the comparison of several real-time programming approaches, either coming from the control theory tradition (Simulink, synchronous languages) or from the computer science tradition (Ada, Java,...),

    - the importance of distributed algorithmics and its relation with fault-tolerance and network architecture.

    - evaluation and optimisation techniques for non-functional properties like performance, dependability, power consumption...,

    - system architecture and engineering methods, and practice.

It is expected that such a curriculum provide engineers with appropriate awareness of the variety of design choices, allowing them to bridge gaps between present design approaches.

Presentation

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14 Oct 2003 at 17:14:26