Today, I served on the PhD committee of Nasim Samimi, who defended her dissertation titled “Edge-Cloud-Assisted Real-Time Cyber-Physical Systems.” This work addresses the challenge of providing predictable real-time guarantees for cyber-physical systems deployed across the edge–cloud continuum. As CPS increasingly rely on distributed, shared, and dynamic infrastructures, traditional design-time schedulability analysis becomes insufficient. The dissertation proposes a set of online admission control, scheduling, and orchestration techniques that provide per-job deadline guarantees and controlled service degradation under bursty workloads. The main contributions span formal job-level admission control for multicore servers, weakly-hard real-time guarantees using (M,K)-firmness, and practical deployment mechanisms for real-time workloads in Kubernetes-based edge–cloud platforms. Together, these contributions aim to bridge the gap between real-time theory and modern cloud-native practice.
I very much enjoyed reading this dissertation, as it tackles an important problem at the intersection of real-time systems, cyber-physical systems, and edge–cloud computing. I particularly appreciate the combination of solid theoretical foundations in the early chapters with increasingly practical contributions in the later chapters. A great example of this is the KubeDeadline technology, which extends Kubernetes to schedule Linux containers according to the well-known SCHED_DEADLINE policy and guarantee them a portion of CPU bandwidth with bounded latency. This work successfully translates classic real-time scheduling concepts into modern edge-cloud software architectures.
The defense went well, and shortly after the beadle pronounced the end of the defense (“Hora est!”), Nasim became Dr. Samimi. Congratulations on this achievement! It was a pleasure to serve on this committee, and I wish Nasim all the best in her future career.
