A Sneak Peek at the Hot Topics Day Program

This year, the RTSS Hot Topics Day will again host a set of diverse and fully packed set of events that will discuss advanced topics on Operating Systems, Hypervisors, Explainability, Analysis, and Optimization of real-time systems, as well as hands-on tutorials!

Please contact the Hot Topics Day Chair, Paolo Gai, with any questions.

The main events hosted will include the following:

QNX Special Session: Developing Safe and Secure Software-Defined Real-Time Embedded Systems — A Robotics System Demonstration Built Using the QNX General Embedded Development Platform

As industries move toward software defined embedded architectures, critical challenges emerge, including selecting appropriate hardware, managing mixed criticality functional safety, and ensuring real time responsiveness. This special session is intended for engineers, researchers, and anyone interested in building real time embedded systems. It features a demonstration of a robotics system built using the QNX General Embedded Development Platform (GEDP), showcasing ROS based interfaces and a cloud connected HMI. The demo further illustrates how QNX GEDP supports the development of scalable, software defined real time embedded systems that must adhere to evolving safety and cybersecurity standards.

OPERA: 3rd Workshop on Optimization for Embedded and Real-Time Systems

Embedded systems are increasingly complex, with growing numbers of interacting components, diverse architectures, and varied semantic models. This complexity makes it challenging to fit new and existing applications onto resource-constrained platforms. To address this, systematic optimization is essential—whether to explore design alternatives, reduce resource usage, or meet strict real-time constraints.

OPERA is a venue for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to come together around the theme of optimization in embedded and real-time systems. The workshop focuses on design-space exploration, system complexity, and performance tuning, providing a forum to share ideas, challenges, and emerging solutions.

ERSA: 4th International Workshop on Explainability of Real-time Systems and their Analysis

In high-integrity domains, software must undergo rigorous assurance and certification processes both before deployment and after maintenance. Verification techniques—such as schedulability analysis and worst-case execution time (WCET) estimation—provide essential evidence of system performance. However, their practical use is often hindered by a lack of explainability. These methods typically produce binary or numeric results (e.g., “tasks are schedulable” or “WCET of program P is 42 ms”) without revealing how those results were derived or what they imply for system behavior and risk.

The ERSA workshop addresses the urgent need for tools and methodologies that not only conduct these analyses but also clearly explain their results and contextual significance.

In addition to workshops, RTSS 2025 will provide an advanced Hands-on Tutorial:

Getting Started with the Quest RTOS and Quest-V Partitioning Hypervisor

Quest is a relatively small real-time operating system (RTOS), developed at Boston University. It works on both uni- and multicore processors, and supports various operating modes depending on the underlying hardware features. It can be configured as either a lightweight SMP system, having a single memory image running on multiple cores, or as a secure separation kernel, known as Quest-V (as in “V for Virtualization”).

This tutorial is intended for both academic researchers and industry practitioners, interested in learning more about Quest and Quest-V. We will describe how to configure, build, develop, debug, and test applications, using code examples. The audience may wish to participate via the use of tools such as QEMU/KVM to run Quest/Quest-V. We welcome anyone who might want to know more about contributing to the work, or using it in their own research.

Further information for all events will be available beginning of August 2025… please stay tuned!