It has been a pleasure to serve as the General Chair of the 31st IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2025). RTAS is a top-tier conference on real-time systems that is a part of the CPS-IoT Week. This year, CPS-IoT week was hosted at UC Irvine, USA, and it was one of the most well-attended instances so far with over 550 registrations from all over the world.
Here are some personal highlights:
- Keynote: “Trusted AI on Mars” by Dr. Steve Chien: This keynote discussed the challenge of controlling the Perseverance rover on Mars. The original planner was time-triggered and struggled to efficiently adapt to unexpected changes, e.g. in temperature and battery state. The core of the presentation covered the design, analysis, prototyping and testing of a new AI-based Onboard Planner that was deployed in October 2023. This planner enabled the schedule to be revised on average 16 times per day to manage resources, such as energy, more efficiently and maximize the scientific operations conducted by the rover. This presentation was very interesting to the real-time systems community as it focused on planning inside a heavily resource-constrained cyber-physical system in a dynamic environment far away from earth. It was interesting to hear the challenges of getting new technology adopted in such a critical system, where the cost of verification and validation is a key driver for decision-making.
- Inaugural CPS-IoT Debate: We have all attended bland panel discussions at conferences. This was different, as it had the format of an Oxford debate and discussed whether the inherent complexity of modern engineering challenges renders exhaustive mathematical analysis overkill, and that an iterative, adaptive design approach should be prioritized—even for life-critical systems. The format, the existential nature of this question for our community, and the excellent choice of the debate team resulted in an engaging session with high audience participation that sparked conversations throughout the day. I strongly encourage other conferences to try out this format.
- RTAS Technical Sessions: The technical sessions of RTAS are always of high quality and interesting. I particularly enjoy the papers that help bring theory into practice. Here are a few papers that stood out to me:
- LiME: The Linux Real-Time Task Model Extractor by Bjorn Brandenburg et al. describes a tool to extract real-time task models from real-time threads in a Linux environment. LiME runs on unmodified Linux kernels and requires neither knowledge of real-time theory nor familiarity with Linux internals to be used effectively. Such a tool can significantly reduce the engineering, modeling, and analysis effort required to develop real-time systems whose timing behavior can be formally verified.
- Reconciling ROS 2 with Classical Real-Time Scheduling of Periodic Tasks by Harun Teper et al. explains how minor changes to the event executor of ROS2 makes a large body of research results from classical real-time scheduling theory directly applicable to ROS 2. This enables analytical bounds on the worst-case response time and the end-to-end latency, outperforming bounds for the default ROS 2 executor in many scenarios.
- CROS-RT: Cross-Layer Priority Scheduling for Predictable Inter-Process Communication in ROS 2 by Kim et al., which won the Best Paper Award, addresses the challenge of providing real-time guarantees in ROS2 due to unpredictable delays and priority inversions across ROS 2’s multi-layered communication architecture. They present a cross-layer scheduler explicitly designed to tackle the unpredictability in ROS 2 inter-process communication that has been implemented and evaluated on the current stable release of ROS 2.
These works all make significant strides in bringing theory to practice. Just imagine what happens if you combine them all!
All in all, it was a very successful event thanks to the excellent work done by Program Chair Tam Chantem, Program Co-chair Geoffrey Nelissen, the General Co-chairs of CPS-IoT Week Mohammad Al Faruque and Yasser Shoukry, Local Arrangement Chairs Fadi Kurdahi and Halle Gonzales, and many others involved in the organization. Of course, RTAS would not have been possible without the many authors who submitted their work and the members of the TPC who took the time to read the submissions and provide high-quality reviews.
