Course Information

Time:
Friday 4:00pm - 6:45pm
Place:
ECSN 2.112
Instructor:
Dr. Cong Liu
Office Hours:
Friday 2:30-3:30 PM (held in ECSS 4.211)
Email:
cong at utdallas dot edu
URL:
Course Website
Textbook
(Required):
Real-Time Systems, Jane Liu, Prentice Hall, 2000.
Online references, including conferece and journal papers.

Course Description

To introduce students to the fundamental problems, concepts, and approaches in the design and analysis of real-time systems. To study issues related to the design and analysis of systems with real-time constraints. The problem of ensuring such constraints is ultimately a scheduling problem, so much attention is devoted to such problems. Note that this is a *must* course for anyone wanting to do real-time systems research in the department.

Prerequisites

CS 5348 (Operating Systems Concepts) or equivalent. In addition, one of the things you need to be comfortable with is computational-complexity issues pertaining to validating timing constraints. Because of this, for a class or two, some basic knowledge of NP-completeness, as covered in undergraduate or graduate algorithms classes, will be useful. Please note that I do not intend to zealously enforce the prerequisites. Anyone with a decent background in algorithms and operating systems should be able to handle the material.

Topics

Objectives

Student Learning Objectives/Outcomes:
  1. Real-time scheduling and schedulability analysis {a,b,c}
  2. Formal specification and verification of timing constraints and properties {a,b,c,d}
  3. Design methods for real-time systems {a,b,c}
  4. Development and implementation of new techniques to advance the state-of-the-art real-time systems research {c,d,e,f}
CS Outcomes:
  1. An ability to understand advanced concepts in theory of computer science;
  2. An ability to understand advanced concepts in applications of computer science;
  3. An ability to apply knowledge of advanced computer science to formulate the analyze problems in computing and solve them;
  4. An ability to learn emerging concepts in theory and applications of computer science;
  5. An ability to design and conduct experiments as well as to analyze and interpret data; and
  6. An ability to function in teams and to communicate effectively.

What to Expect

Here are the major parts of all the assignments and projects.
Reading assignments
These will be general directions for reading the text book and selected papers. It is a better idea to do them before coming to each class.

Homework Assignments
We will probably have a couple of homework asssignemnts. These assignments must be completed individually. They are designed to make sure you are keeping pace (you should not find them extraordinarily time-consuming).

Paper presentation
Each student will present (in 15 minutes) an assigned paper. At the end of each presentation, please add one or two slides critiquing the paper. Think of yourself as a conference or journal reviewer on the same subject. Sample questions you can raise and discuss include: Are the assumptions reasonable and realistic? Are there any technical errors and limitations? How to improve the work?

Exam
There will be a open-book open-notes written final exame, which covers the whole course.

Quiz
There will be two quizzes. The second one will be close-book close-note.

Project
Each student must complete a research-oriented course project. You are responsible for defining your own project. The outcome of your project should be a decent quality research paper. The project must be a fairly significant piece of work. It is perfectly fine to use research from an RA position as the basis for your class project as long as it is related to real-time systems or scheduling. Two-person projects may be permitted, provided the total work involved is about twice that of the typical single-person project. More information on the project including my suggested project ideas (again I encourage you to come up with your own project ideas) can be found here.

Attendance and Class Participation
Attendance is required for this class. This class will be far more enjoyable for everyone if all students come to class ready and willing to discuss the materials to be covered. I plan to reward those who consistently participate in class by increasing their final grade by up to half a letter grade.

Grading
Homework Assignments: 10%
Paper presentation: 10%
Quiz: 20%
Final exam: 20%
Project:40%

Late Policy

No lateness (it's a real-time class anyway).

Honor Code