The purpose of this seminar is to independently and scientifically work on a topic on synchronous languages and related areas. The goal is to summarize the topic in an oral presentation and a written elaboration in form of a paper. Another purpose of this seminar is to practice working in structured and time-driven workflows (e.g. for conferences or workshops). Moreover, both of these aspects are a good preparation for working on your thesis. We have many theses regarding these topics available; contact us if you are interested in that.

This seminar is a bachelor and master module at the same time. Compared to the bachelor seminar, we expect that master students include more related work and therefore write a longer paper and hold a longer presentation (see below).

Prerequisites

This seminar is built upon the contents of the "Synchronous Languages" lecture. All participants that did not yet attend this lecture are recommended to read the following introduction paper, at least parts I and II:

Benveniste, A.; Caspi, P.; Edwards, S.A.; Halbwachs, N.; Le Guernic, P.; de Simone, R., "The synchronous languages 12 years later," Proceedings of the IEEE , vol.91, no.1, pp.64,83, Jan 2003 (pdf).

Moreover, we recommend the attendance of the lecture "Scientific Working for Seminars and Thesis" (Wissenschaftliches Arbeiten für Seminar und Abschlussarbeiten) held by Prof. Peters.

Lecturers

Reinhard von Hanxleden (rvh@informatik.uni-kiel.de) 
Jette Petzold (jep@informatik.uni-kiel.de)
Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten (als@informatik.uni-kiel.de)

Topics

You may choose from one of the following papers. The scope, complexity and required knowledge for these papers roughly divides them into topics for bachelor students and for master students. However, bachelor students that take great interest in a master students topic may also choose from those.   

The papers are assigned via first-come-first-serve. Already taken papers are marked. Please send an email to Jette (jep@informatik.uni-kiel.de) in order to reserve a paper.

Many of the links do only work in the university network. Through the usage of a VPN or a remote session to the terminal server, those are also accessible from home. If any problems occur feel free to contact us.

Bachelor Recommendations

Synchronous

S. A. Edwards and J. Hui, The Sparse Synchronous Model, 2020 Forum for Specification and Design Languages (FDL), 2020, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/FDL50818.2020.9232938.

J. Deantoni, J. Cambeiro, S. Bateni, S. Lin and M. Lohstroh, Debugging and Verification Tools for Lingua Franca in Gemoc Studio, 2021 Forum on specification & Design Languages (FDL), 2021, pp. 01-08, doi: 10.1109/FDL53530.2021.9568383.

Juha-Pekka Tolvanen and Steven Kelly. 2018. Effort Used to Create Domain-Specific Modeling Languages. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 235-244.

M. Lohstroh, C. Menard, A. Schulz-Rosengarten, M. Weber, J. Castrillon and E. A. Lee, A Language for Deterministic Coordination Across Multiple Timelines, 2020 Forum for Specification and Design Languages (FDL), 2020

[assigned] L. Grimm, S. Smyth, A. Schulz-Rosengarten, R. von Hanxleden and M. Pouzet, From Lustre to Graphical Models and SCCharts, 2020 Forum for Specification and Design Languages (FDL), 2020, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/FDL50818.2020.9232944.

M. C. Werner and K. Schneider, "From IEC 61131-3 Function Block Diagrams to Sequentially Constructive Statecharts," 2022 Forum on Specification & Design Languages (FDL), Linz, Austria, 2022, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/FDL56239.2022.9925656.

Fabien Siron, Dumitru Potop-Butucaru, Robert De Simone, Damien Chabrol, and Amira Methni. 2023. Semantics foundations of PsyC based on synchronous Logical Execution Time. In Proceedings of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things Week 2023 (CPS-IoT Week '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 319–324. https://doi.org/10.1145/3576914.3587495

[assigned] Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, Reinhard von Hanxleden, Marten Lohstroh, Edward A. Lee, and Soroush Bateni. 2023. Polyglot Modal Models through Lingua Franca. In Proceedings of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things Week 2023 (CPS-IoT Week '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 337–342. https://doi.org/10.1145/3576914.3587498 (There is also a long version)

Safety Analysis / Model Checking

[assigned] S. Baumgart, J. Fröberg, and S. Punnekkat, Analyzing hazards in system-of-systems: Described in a quarry site automation context. 2017 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), 2017, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/SYSCON.2017.7934783.

[assigned] F. G. R. de Souza, J. de Melo Bezerra, C. M. Hirata, P. de Saqui-Sannes and L. Apvrille, Combining STPA with SysML Modeling. 2020 IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), 2020, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/SysCon47679.2020.9275867.

[assigned] J. Kloos, T. Hussain, and R. Eschbach. Risk-based testing of safety-critical embedded systems driven by fault tree analysis. In 2011 IEEE Fourth International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation Workshops, pp. 26-33. IEEE, 2011.

[assigned] L. A. Cortes, P. Eles and Z. Peng, Formal coverification of embedded systems using model checking. Proceedings of the 26th Euromicro Conference. EUROMICRO 2000. Informatics: Inventing the Future. Vol. 1. IEEE, 2000.

Master Recommendations

Synchronous

Tobias Sehnke, Dieter Schwarzmann, Matthias Schultalbers, and Rolf Ernst. 2017. Temporal properties in automotive control software. In Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Real-Time Networks and Systems (RTNS '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 98-107.

Dumitru Potop-Butucaru, Robert de Simone, Yves Sorel, and Jean-Pierre Talpin, Clock-driven distributed real-time implementation of endochronous synchronous programs, In Proceedings of the seventh ACM international conference on Embedded software, New York, USA, 2009

Guillaume Baudart, Louis Mandel, Eric Atkinson, Benjamin Sherman, Marc Pouzet, and Michael Carbin. 2020. Reactive probabilistic programming. In Proceedings of the 41st ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation (PLDI 2020)

Evgeny Kusmenko, Bernhard Rumpe, Sascha Schneiders, and Michael von Wenckstern. 2018. Highly-Optimizing and Multi-Target Compiler for Embedded System Models: C++ Compiler Toolchain for the Component and Connector Language EmbeddedMontiArc. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 447-457.

Kenwright, L., Roop, P.S., Allen, N., Lall, S., Cascaval, C., Spalink, T., & Izzard, M. (2024). Logical Synchrony Networks: A formal model for deterministic distribution. ArXiv, abs/2402.07433.

K. Didier, A. Cohen, D. Potop-Butucaru and A. Gauffriau, "Sheep in wolf's Clothing: Implementation Models for Dataflow Multi-Threaded Software," 2019 19th International Conference on Application of Concurrency to System Design (ACSD), Aachen, Germany, 2019, pp. 43-52, doi: 10.1109/ACSD.2019.00009.

Timothy Bourke, Vincent Bregeon, and Marc Pouzet. Scheduling and Compiling Rate-Synchronous Programs with End-To-End Latency Constraints. In 35th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2023). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 262, pp. 1:1-1:22, Schloss Dagstuhl - Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2023) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ECRTS.2023.1

Pascal Fradet, Alain Girault, and Alexandre Honorat. 2023. Sequential Scheduling of Dataflow Graphs for Memory Peak Minimization. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES 2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 76–86. https://doi.org/10.1145/3589610.3596280

Shaokai Lin, Yatin A. Manerkar, Marten Lohstroh, Elizabeth Polgreen, Sheng-Jung Yu, Chadlia Jerad, Edward A. Lee, and Sanjit A. Seshia. 2023. Towards Building Verifiable CPS using Lingua Franca. ACM Trans. Embed. Comput. Syst. 22, 5s, Article 155 (October 2023), 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3609134

Christian Menard, Marten Lohstroh, Soroush Bateni, Matthew Chorlian, Arthur Deng, Peter Donovan, Clément Fournier, Shaokai Lin, Felix Suchert, Tassilo Tanneberger, Hokeun Kim, Jeronimo Castrillon, and Edward A. Lee. 2023. High-performance Deterministic Concurrency Using Lingua Franca. ACM Trans. Archit. Code Optim. 20, 4, Article 48 (December 2023), 29 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3617687

Safety Analysis / Testing

Carlos A. González, Mojtaba Varmazyar, Shiva Nejati, Lionel C. Briand, and Yago Isasi. 2018. Enabling Model Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems. In Proceedings of the 21th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS '18). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 176-186.

A. Gannous, A. Andrews and B. Gallina, Toward a Systematic and Safety Evidence Productive Verification Approach for Safety-Critical Systems. 2018 IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering Workshops (ISSREW), 2018, pp. 329-336, doi: 10.1109/ISSREW.2018.00026.

Schedule

Dates in the semester

¹preliminary date; please contact us if there are any conflicts with exams

The Final Presentations

The presentation of the prepared topic is held during a block seminar at CAP4 R. 1304a. The attendance at the seminar day is mandatory. Every attending person receives the proceedings of the current semester.

Agenda

Here the agenda as PDF.

Schedule and Grading

Papers, Talks, Review

This seminar includes creating a paper, a talk, and two reviews.

Paper

The paper should provide an overview of the chosen topic. It should be written in a style that late bachelor student can understand it. The paper should be 6 (master) or 4 (bachelor) pages long (including bibliography), not more not less, and it should use the ACM LaTeX-style (more details below). We advise you to read the writing advice for writing a thesis. You can write your paper either in English or German.

Talk

The talk should be 30 minutes (master) or 20 minutes (bachelor) long. This is followed by 5 minutes of questions. The slides should contain page numbers to allow the participants to ask specific questions after the talk. It would be great to include a short tool demo if your topic includes some concrete implementation.

You can freely choose your presentation tool. Therefore, for the individual dates on the presentation slides it would be best to to use your own computer. If the slides are provided as PDF beforehand, a different computer could be used. 

Especially when using online tools, note that the block seminar might take place in Falckenstein and that there is no WLAN access. Therefore, the presentations must allow to be held offline.

The talk can be held in English or German.

Review

A review consist of two parts:

1. General comments (what do you like/ not like regarding content, structure, and readability) as well as general suggestions to improve the paper
2. In detail remarks and corrections

The first part of the review should be at least half an A4 page long. It should be written in full text and not only consist of notes. The review content should be similar to the review you get during the individual dates, however, it should be more in detail and with a clear focus on content, structure, and readability of the paper.

It is not possible to add files in the EasyChair review form. Therefore, it is not possible to add an annotated pdf as detailed correction.

Some example reviews from a previous semester to understand the form (not necessarily with the best grades) can be found in here: 1 2 3 4 5.

The reviews are assigned after the review-version deadline and are based on the submitted version of the papers.

Grades

This seminar is graded. The grade is based on each milestone (the different versions of the paper, the reviews, the slides, the talk, engagement in the workshop). For each milestone quality, timing (see dates) are graded. Missed deadline may cause you to fail the seminar.

Technical Details

LaTeX

Your papers should be created using LaTeX and have to be in the provided ACM style. You can find all necessary files in this archive, including an example document that includes helpful LaTeX-hints to start with. Copy all files in some folder and begin to write your paper.

LaTeX can create a bibliography (it includes scientific publications, which are referenced to prove statements) too. The example includes a file named myrefs.bib, which holds the references. ACM provides a short overview with examples of bibliography entries.

While writing your paper keep the following in mind:

• Think about whether you want to write your paper in German or English and make use to use the corresponding ACM-style.
• If you use graphics from your original paper, you should not just add a screenshotted of the pdf your paper. Try to use the image from the original paper by exporting them, including the pdf directly (\inlcudegraphics[page=... trim=...]{*.pdf}), or by recreating the image by yourself (ideally as a vector graphic). This way you should get a result that is not pixelated or at least not worse than the original.
• A paper always consists of an introduction, at least one main chapter, and a conclusion.

EasyChair Tutorial

The Tutorial

You can find our seminar in EasyChair: Link

Resources

In general, it is advised to look for related work in the university network since you will get access to many online libraries. We the following search engines and web pages:

• Google Scholar: http://scholar.google.de/
• dblp: http://dblp.uni-trier.de/
• CiteSeer: http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
• IEEE-Xplore: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/dynhome.jsp
• ACM Digital Library: http://portal.acm.org/dl.cfm
• Universitätsbibliothek Digitale Medien: http://www.uni-kiel.de/ub/emedien/index.html