This year, the RTSS Hot Topics Day again hosts a packed set of diverse events that will discuss advanced topics on Operating Systems, Hypervisors, Explainability, Analysis, and Optimization of real-time systems, as well as hands-on tutorials!
Hot Topics Day Program
| Time | Program | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 8:00 AM | registration | 9th Floor of CCDS use elevators near south-west entrance |
| 8:00 AM | welcome breakfast |
CCDS 9th Floor Collaborative Space |
| 9:00 AM | Technical Session 1 QNX | OPERA | ERSA |
CCDS Rooms 950 | 548 | 1101 |
| 10:30 AM | coffee break |
CCDS 9th Floor Collaborative Space |
| 11:00 AM | Technical Session 2 QNX | OPERA | ERSA |
CCDS Rooms 950 | 548 | 1101 |
| 12:30 PM | lunch |
CCDS 9th Floor Collaborative Space |
| 2:00 PM | Technical Session 3 OPERA | Quest-V | ERSA panel |
CCDS Rooms 548 | 950 | 1101 |
| 3:30 PM | coffee break |
CCDS 9th Floor Collaborative Space |
| 4:00 PM | Technical Session 4 OPERA | Quest-V |
CCDS Rooms 548 | 950 |
| 6:00 PM | Diversity & First-Timer Reception |
Fuller’s BU Pub (225 Bay State Road Boston, MA 02215) |
🗓️ Import the HTD program in your calendar: RTSS 2025 agenda in ICS format
Breakout Rooms
Additionally, two smaller breakout rooms are available for individual meetings on a first-come, first-serve basis from 8:00 am until 6:00 pm :
- CCDS 1001 — fits up to 20 persons
- CCDS 614 — fits up to 12 persons
Hot Topics Day Events
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
Room: CCDS 950
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
Room: CCDS 548
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
Room: CCDS 1101
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
Room: CCDS 950
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.
Contact
Please contact the Hot Topics Day Chair, Paolo Gai, with any questions.