RTSS 2020

41st IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2020)

The safety and well-being of all conference participants is our top priority. After studying and evaluating the announcements, guidance, and news released by relevant national departments, we are announcing that the IEEE RTSS 2020, scheduled to be held in-person in Houston, TX will now be converted into an all-digital conference experience. The dates of the conference will remain the same. We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. More details regarding the conference and online registration will be available soon.

The IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) is the premier conference in the field of real-time systems, and is a venue for researchers and practitioners to showcase innovations covering all aspects of real-time systems, including theory, design, analysis, implementation, evaluation, and experience. RTSS '20, celebrating the 41st anniversary of the event, continues the trend of making RTSS an expansive and inclusive event, striving to embrace new and emerging areas of real-time systems research.

Scope of the Conference

The IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS) is the premier conference in the field of real-time systems, and is a venue for researchers and practitioners to showcase innovations covering all aspects of real-time systems, including theory, design, analysis, implementation, evaluation, and experience. RTSS'20, celebrating the 41st anniversary of the event, continues the trend of making RTSS an expansive and inclusive event, striving to embrace new and emerging areas of real-time systems research.

RTSS'20 welcomes submissions of high-quality, original research papers related to both real-time system theory and practice. Submissions can go to either the real-time system track (Track 1) or the design and application track (Track 2) which covers Trustworthy Intelligent Systems, Cyber-Physical Systems, HW-SW integration and system-level design, and Internet of Things (IoT). Details of the tracks can be found below. To be in scope, ALL submissions must address some form of real-time requirements such as deadlines, response times or delays/latency.

RTSS'20 especially welcomes new and emerging topics provided that they address some aspects of real-time requirements as stated above. Such topics may include machine learning techniques for design and analysis of real-time systems, system design approaches for achieving real-time machine learning, resource management in autonomous systems, system-level solutions for real-time applications exploiting domain-specific accelerators, etc.

All accepted papers will appear in the main program and proceedings. A selection of papers will receive recognition as outstanding papers, and will be highlighted as such in the proceedings. Authors of outstanding papers will be invited to submit an extended version of their work to a special issue of a journal. Best paper and best student paper awards will be presented at the conference, along with an award for the best presentation. (Note that submissions are eligible for the best student paper award provided that the first author is a student as of the submission deadline).

Track 1: Real-Time System Track

The objective of this track is to promote cutting-edge research in real-time systems, especially new and emerging topics. Areas of interest include, but are not limited to the following: operating systems, networks, middleware, compilers, tools, scheduling, QoS support, resource management, testing and debugging, design and verification, modeling, WCET analysis, performance analysis, fault tolerance, security, and system experimentation and deployment experiences.

Track 2: Design and Application Track

This track aims to highlight the newest research achievements in designs, implementations and applications that must attend to some aspects of real-time requirements. Continuing with the success in previous years, the track will particularly focus on four specialized areas:

Trustworthy Intelligent Systems

The deployment of intelligent systems in real-world systems calls for methods and methodologies that ensure the trustworthiness of the intelligent system. The challenges in this field include developing techniques to defend a trained system against adversarial inputs; techniques to ensure that the learning is safe and robust, even when some of the learning data may be fake; techniques to even distinguish the generated (fake) data from real content; techniques to prevent intelligent systems to leak sensitive information about themselves and the training data. Of special interest is research on how the timing of the system or the data impacts the trustworthiness of intelligent systems, and how do we protect against such intentional or unintentional timing attacks.

Cyber-Physical Systems

Many applications in the CPS domain (such as transportation, healthcare, industrial control, etc.) possess real-time requirements. Papers are welcomed that identify scientific foundations and technologies that advance the state-of-the-art for CPS. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to) new theories for CPS, design methods, simulation/emulation for CPS, tools chains, CPS architectures, security and privacy, hardware/software compositions that include physical components, analysis techniques and tools especially those with multiple temporal and spatial scales, performance analysis, robustness and safety.

HW-SW Integration and System-Level Design

This area focuses on design methodologies and tools for hardware/software integration and co-design of modern embedded systems for real-time applications. Topics include (but are not limited to) architecture description languages and tools, hardware architectures, design space exploration, synthesis and optimization. Of special interest are SoC design for real-time applications, special-purpose functional units, specialized memory structures, multi-core chips and communication aspects, FPGA simulation and prototyping, software simulation and compilation for novel architectures and applications, as well as power, thermal, timing and predictability analyses.

Internet of Things (IoT)

Grand challenges in IoT include extremely constrained resources (energy supply, storage and computational power) in IoT devices, unprecedented scalability requirements as well as uncertain dynamics in their operating environments. Submissions are welcomed that build on solid theoretical foundations, present empirical development, and experimental evaluations for empowering IoT applications. Of special interest is research addressing aspects of scalability, interoperability, uncertainty, reliability, security, power management, energy scavenging, architectures, operating systems, middleware and programming abstractions, protocols, modelling, analysis and performance evaluation.