June 2022 – Benny Akesson

Survey of Industry Practice on Top Lists of Real-time Systems Journal 2021

Posted on June 28, 2022June 28, 2022 by bennyakesson

I am pleased to see that our work “A comprehensive survey of industry practice in real-time systems” made both the lists for most downloaded and most cited articles in the Real-time Systems journal of 2021. I hope this is an indicator that people appreciate the paper, but also that it inspires other to pursue empirical survey-based or interview-based research in the area of real-time systems.

Next week, Mitra Nasri will pitch the case for empirical research into industry practice and perspective in real-time systems at ECRTS. Don’t miss the opportunity to hear her speak and share your thoughts on this topic and how it may help the field forward. For those of you that are not able to attend ECRTS, you can read my blog making the case for empirical survey-based research here.

Paper Accepted at PNSE 2022

Posted on June 2, 2022June 2, 2022 by bennyakesson

I am happy to announce that the paper “Partial Specifications of Component-based Systems using Petri Nets” has been accepted for publication at the International Workshop on Petri Nets and Software Engineering (PNSE) 2022. This paper was first-authored by Bart-Jan Hilbrands, a (former) student in the Master of Software Engineering program at the University of Amsterdam, who did his master thesis project under the supervision of myself and my ESI colleague Debjyoti Bera. The master thesis project was conducted in the context of the DYNAMICS project, a bi-lateral research project between ESI and Thales, which looked into specification, verification, and adaptation of software interfaces. This publication is a good example of how a good master thesis can be turned into a publication.

The paper addresses the problem of verifying correctness properties, such as absence of deadlocks, livelocks, and buffer overflows, in software components with multiple inter-dependent interfaces. An approach based on partial specification of dependencies between interfaces, expressed as a set of functional constraints, is proposed in the paper. The papers presents and formalizes three commonly occurring functional constraints and provides algorithms for encoding them into a Petri net representation of the interfaces, enabling interface verification through reachability analysis. The approach has been implemented and demonstrated using ComMA.

Serving the Real-time Systems Community

Posted on June 1, 2022June 2, 2022 by bennyakesson

I have been a part of the academic real-time systems community for many years by serving on the technical program committee of many key conferences, as well as reviewing articles for the real-time systems journal. This year, I am serving the real-time systems community in the following four ways.

I was invited to serve the Technical Community on Real-time Systems (TCRTS) of the IEEE Computer Society as a member of the Industry Outreach Subcommittee for a period of two years.
I joined the Editorial Board of the Real-time Systems Journal as an Associate Editor
I was appointed RTSS@Work Chair at the at Real-time Systems Symposium 2022
I served as Technical Program Committee member for the IEEE International Conference on Embedded and Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications (RTCSA)

I look forward to working with and serving the community in these roles.