PhD defence by Thomas Bøgholm

In partial fulfillment of the terms for obtaining the Ph.D.-degree, Thomas Bøgholm will give a lecture on the following subject:
Hard Real-Time Java: Profiles and Schedulability Analysis
on Thursday 8th of November 2012, 14.00,
in room 0.2.13 at Selma Lagerlöfs Vej 300

Abstract:
Embedded systems are the invisible computer systems in the traction control system of a modern car, the control system of a power plant, the control systems of the water pumps and the power metres in our houses, and they even play a role in small devices, such as hearing aids and pace makers. For such devices, correct operation is especially important since most systems are mass produced, have little or no possibility for software  updates or other maintenance after being deployed, and because they may be a part of life-critical systems.

This thesis presents a model based approach to the program analysis of real-time Java systems and the development of Java profiles supporting such systems and their analysis. The goal of this work is to enable the development of safety-critical embedded systems in high level modern languages; languages which more elegantly capture the complexities of modern embedded systems and is supported by modern software engineering practices.

The work is twofold and concerns both tool development and real-time Java profile design.

The tool development revolves around the schedulability analysis tool, SARTS. The goal of SARTS is a fully automatic tool to be used by software engineers as a part of the development of real-time systems. SARTS is extended to handle more complex features of Java, such as object finalization. A new proposal based on verified program abstractions is made in order to cope with the state-space explosion problem arising from full-program analysis, and as an initial step to include software-libraries in the schedulability analysis.
Work on real-time Java includes design and implementations of the Predictable Java profile, a constructive criticism on the upcoming Safety Critical Java(SCJ) specification. Related to this work, a complete reconstruction of SCJ and its predecessor the Real-Time Specification for Java is presented. This work results in four simple and well defined Java profiles.

Members of the assessment committee are Professor Michael R. Hansen, DTU Informatics, Technical University of Denmark, Professor Peter H. Schmitt, Department of Computer Science. Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany, and Associate Professor Kurt Nørmark, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, Denmark. Associate Professor, Bent Thomsen and Professor Anders P. Ravn, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University, are Thomas Bøgholms supervisors.

All interested parties are welcome. After the defense the department will be hosting a small reception in cluster 3.