Reactive and Real-Time Systems Course: How to Get the Most Out of it

Abstract

The paper describes the syllabus and the students’ projects from a graduate course on the subject of “Reactive and Real-Time Systems”, taught at Tel-Aviv University and at the Open University of Israel. The course focuses on the development of provably correct reactive real-time systems. The course combines theoretical issues with practical implementation experience, trying to make things as tangible as possible. Hence, the mathematical and logical frameworks introduced are followed by presentation of relevant software tools and the students’ projects are implemented using these tools. The course is planned so that no special purpose hardware is needed and so that all software tools used are freely available from various Internet sites and can be installed quite easily. This makes our course attractive to institutions and instructors for which purchasing and maintaining a special lab is not feasible due to budget, space, or time limitations (as in our case). In the paper we elaborate on the rationale behind the syllabus and the selection of the students’ projects, presenting an almost complete description of a sample design of one team’s project.