Real-time Workshop Agenda

Scheduling and Resource Management is one area of increasing interest to provide middleware services that guarantee quality of services (QoS) to the applications, independently of the details of a particular networking environment.  In this session some novel research results concerning the specification, the design approaches, and benchmarking of QoS parameters in diverse execution environments will be presented.

• Resource Management Using Multiple Feedback Loops
  V. Kalogeraki, P. M. Melliar-Smith and L. E. Moser, University of California, Santa Barbara

This presentation will describe a Resource Management System that is based on a three-level feedback loop with different levels of granularity. The Resource Management System employs a profiling algorithm that measures the usage of the resources and monitors the behavior of the objects, a dynamic scheduling algorithm that schedules the methods of the objects invoked by the activities, and distribution and migration algorithms that allocate and reallocate objects to balance the load on the resources.

• Quality Objects (QuO): Adaptive Management and Control Middleware for End-to-End QoS 
  Craig Rodrigues, Joseph P. Loyall, Richard E. Schantz,  BBN Technologies

This presentation describes the Quality Objects (QuO) project at BBN, an effort to create a distributed object framework that allows distributed applications to specify their QoS requirements, without having to directly use low-level networking technologies and API's. 

• Measuring Gross vs Net ORB Performance
  Brad Balfour, Objective Interface Systems

This presentation will discuss the concepts of Gross and Net End to End Round Trip Time measurement.  Its  focus is strictly on the technical education of developers in this benchmarking concept.  The concept is one that will introduce a more meaningful comparison among real-time ORBs to more accurately allow comparison of these ORBs in multiple contexts and to allow extrapolation of existing comparisons to be meaningfully applied to other, untested, situations.

• Using a Real-Time, QoS-based ORB to Intelligently Manage Communications Bandwidth in a Multi-Protocol Environment
  Bill Beckwith, Objective Interface Systems

The presentation will discuss and disclose measurements of the affect of using various QoS parameters on a system based on a Real-Time, QoS-based ORB implementation (ORBexpress RT).

• Measuring Distributed and Local Priority Inversions in Real-Time ORBs
  Victor Giddings, Objective Interface Systems

Understanding the nature and duration of priority inversions introduced or mediated by a Real-Time ORB is important to understanding the predictability of the Real-Time CORBA system.  The presence of priority inversions may be caused by the ORB implementation, the RTOS it is hosted on, the communications transports it uses, and the application logic.  Measurement is a useful technique to determine priority inversions.

• CORBA AND CONTROL SYSTEMS RESEARCH
  Mr. Ricardo Sanz, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

This a position/vision presentation on the extremely important role that CORBA and Real-time CORBA are going to play in advanced control systems development and in particular as a foundation for research in control systems that include high degrees of intelligence.

• Current and Planned Uses of Middleware in Embedded/Real-time Applications
  Paul Czerny, PH. D, Venture Development Corporation

This talk will present data that Venture Development Corporation collected for its "Internet Enabling Applications and Middleware in Embedded Systems" reported and show what percentage of embedded/real-time applications currently in development will be using middleware as part of the application by vertical market.  Finally, data will be presented that show type of middleware, penetration percentages, and vertical market distribution for the next application planned by the surveyed companies.  

• The Weapon Systems Open Architecture (WOA)
  Dennis Noll, Boeing Phantom Works / Bold Stroke

This presentation focuses on how current and emerging standards-based RT CORBA features and additional middleware technology research address the technical challenges posed by the WSOA project objective.

• Experiences from the trenches; Embedded and real-time CORBA in Telecom
  Dr. Sam Aslam-Mir Ph.D., Vertel

This session will examine some of the experiences and the lessons learned by a CORBA implementer in trying to fulfill the needs of its early adopter customers in these times of increasing awareness of embedded, real-time, and minimal CORBA.

• How to Talk about Qualities of Service to Your Portable Communications Interface
  Mr. Joseph Cross, Lockheed Martin Naval Electronic & Surveillance Systems-Eagan 

This presentation presents a precise, portable, and expressive mechanism by which quality of service parameters and traffic specification parameters can be specified by an application to its communications infrastructure. The central idea is to specify not just a number for a value such as latency, and not  just a probability density, but rather a set of acceptable probability densities, defined by an upper bound and a lower bound on their cumulative density functions.

• The Temporal Firewall - a standardized interface in the time-triggered architecture
  Mr. Hermann Kopetz, Technical University of Vienna, Austria

In this presentation, the structure and the properties of the temporal firewall interface will be described. Since the temporal firewall interface is precisely defined in the value domain and in the temporal domain,  it is possible to partition the design process of a real-time application into two phases: the architecture design phase and the component design and implementation phase. It will be shown how this composable approach helps to structure the design process and to solve the reuse problem.

• Activity: An End-to-End Abstraction for Real-Time CORBA
  Mr. E. Douglas Jensen, The MITRE Corporation

The OMG Real-Time CORBA 1.0 Specification (orbos/99-02-12 and 99-03-29) used the "activity" abstraction as an analysis/design concept for end-to-end predictability of timeliness. But it left the details of the abstraction undefined. This presentation outlines a complete definition of the activity abstraction. This definition of the abstraction will be explicitly supported in the next revision of the Joint Proposal for Dynamic Real-Time CORBA. Very similar versions of this abstraction have been successfully implemented in several other real-time operating system and middleware contexts, and employed in a number of experimental applications.

• CORBA Services Supporting High-Level Real-Time Objects
  Mr. Kane Kim, DREAM Lab University of California, Irvine

This presentation presents the architectures and implementation models of both CORBA services, TMOES and CNCM. An interesting issue which needs to be analyzed in the near future is whether it will be cost-effective to migrate some parts of the two CORBA services down to the ORB and IDL area.

• Using UML-based Framework to Integrate Real-time Object-oriented Programming Models. 
  Professor Carlos Eduardo Pereira and Leandro Becker, Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - Brazil

Presented by Professor Carlos Eduardo Pereira, this report presents the most recent research experiences of the Robotics, Automation and Control Group (GCAR) from the Electrical Engineering Department of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul - Brazil, in the use of real-time object-oriented programming models for industrial automation purposes.

• Proving Security and Reliability Attributes for Distributed Real-Time Systems using Meta Object Models
  John C. Shovic, A. David McKinnon and David E. Bakken, Washington State University

With the increased numbers of embedded systems in the modern technological civilization and the explosion of methods of communications between those systems, security and reliability is becoming more and more important. This paper describes a novel path to showing and proving attributes of security and reliability in a distributed RealTime embedded system environments such as CORBA. Meta Object Models are used as a basis for describing and implementing software systems in such a way that The mathematical underpinnings of Meta Object Models (MOM) are described and applications of MOM in Real Time applications are shown. The communication paths for embedded systems (both internal to the embedded system and external to the system using CORBA) are described and abstracted and the issues of applying MOM to such a system are enumerated. The issues of extending the mathematical underpinnings to fully implement a real time operating system are also discussed.

• Software Definable Radio Component Deployment Specification
  Mr. Mark Adams, Software Technology, Dawn Szelc, The MITRE Corporation

The Software Communications Architecture (SCA) specification has been developed under the Joint Tactical Radio System program for US military tactical communications. This component deployment specification has by principle been designed to duplicate the philosophy of the CORBA Components

• CORBA, Minimum CORBA, Minature CORBA, micro-CORBA: how low can we go? How low must we go?  
  A. David McKinnon, David E. Bakken, John C. Shovic, Washington State University

CORBA provides a nice object oriented and platform neutral middle-ware environment for developing distributed systems. As networking technology has improved, traditional stand-alone applications are gradually evolving into distributed applications. This trend is especially apparent at the desktop and in corporate computing centers, but it is also a trend that is reaching down into the embedded systems market. Recent specifications such as the minimumCORBA and Real-Time CORBA specifications have begun to address the concerns of the embedded systems market. But still more must be done! The deeply embedded market (e.g., smart home appliances, cell-phones, PDAs) operate with just a small fraction of the resources that a typical desktop system or a large embedded system (e.g., airplane autopilot or telco switch) has. Thus reducing CORBA's footprint by half is a good first step, but not sufficient. Smaller standards or standard subsets must be developed so that some uniformity can be brought to the low end of the embedded systems market. This paper will present some of the issues unique to the deeply embedded systems domain and propose a few paths forward on these issues.

• Hybrid Middleware for Embedded Devices in Wireless Ad-hoc Networks
  Stephen S. Yau and Fariaz Karim, Arizona State University

As the advent of Real-time CORBA and Minimum CORBA shows, future middleware solutions must provide different types of adaptation facilities to optimize different aspects of Quality of Service (QoS) in a dynamic environment. In the case of wireless ad-hoc networks, the mobility of different devices and increasing use of multimedia traffic makes the current scope of middleware specifications inadequate.       A hybrid middleware is implemented in software and hardware, and combines the power of abstraction provided by mainstream middleware specifications (e.g. CORBA) with the flexibility of reconfigurable hardware to provide adaptive object services for the networked embedded devices.

• A Case Study on the Application of CORBA Products and Concepts to an Actual Real-time Embedded System
  Mr. Bruce Trask, Contact Systems

This presentation will explain how commercial-off-the-shelf CORBA middleware has been used to drastically reduce the time and money spent to develop world class real-time embedded software while at the same time directly meeting most real-time constraints of our problem domain. In cases where these constraints were not directly met, the presentation will discuss how a CORBA compliant ORB can be easily and seamlessly extended with additional QoS capabilities that satisfy these real-time constraints. From a technical standpoint, the presentation will explain how Contract Systems employed  CORBA middleware capabilities and services to help realize a state-of-the-art SMT pick and place machine.

Workshop Program Committee

Co-Chair - Richard Soley, Object Management Group
Co-Chair - Douglas C. Schmidt, University of California, Irvine 

Members:

Jishnu Mukerji, Hewlett Packard Corporation
David Barnett, Highlander Engineering
Jon Currey, Highlander Engineering
Rob Van Blommestein, Highlander Engineering
Bruce Douglass, I-Logix, Inc.
Dock Allen, MITRE
Douglas Jensen, MITRE
Bill Beckwith, Objective Interface Systems
Victor Giddings, Objective Interface Systems
Janice Gilman, Object Management Group
Kevin Loughry, Object Management Group
Jon Siegel, Object Management Group
Mark Gerhardt, Timesys
Doug Locke, Timesys
Peter Kortmann, Tri-Pacific Software Inc.
Ben Watson, Tri-Pacific Software Inc.
Hermann Kopetz, TTTech
Kane Kim, University of California, Irvine
Dr. Sam Aslam-Mir, Vertel