International workshop on real-time Ada issues: summary report

Abstract

This workshop, sponsored by Ada U. K. in cooperation with ACM SIGAda, was held in Devon, England, during 13--15 May 1987. It comprised five main sessions on the broad and overlapping topics of Application Requirements, Tasking, Issues in Distributed Processing, Run-Time System Issues, and Design and Development Techniques. A summary session at the end established a set of conclusions and recommendations.Participants in the workshop were selected on the basis of submitted position papers. There were 37 attendees, with 16 representing organizations that are users/implementors of real-time software, 11 representing academic institutions or research laboratories, 6 representing vendors of Ada compilers, and 4 representing hardware manufacturers. The users were principally concerned with avionics and other "hard" real-time applications, as opposed to plant processing control or similar systems with "soft" real-time constraints. Partitioned by country, there were 20 from the U. S., 7 from the U. K., 4 from France, and 1 each from Denmark, Finland, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden. (Five from the U. S. were in fact natives of the U.K., so there were more British accents than might be apparent from these figures.)This paper is a summary of the three-day workshop. Complete proceedings including position papers by the participants have been published as a special issue of Ada Letters (Volume VII, Number 6, Fall 1987).