The purpose of this seminar is to independently and scientifically work on a topic on embedded real-time systems, railway technology 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

For the participation of this seminar the attendance of the "Embedded Real-Time Systems" lecture is not specifically required. However, specific lecture topics required for the paper should be reworked.

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

Finally, there is the infamous "Vortragsvortrag" by Christoph Daniel Schulze. Sadly, he is not at RTSYS anymore to give that talk in person. However, he kindly started to prepare this sequence of videos that should get the gist across as well.

Lecturers

Reinhard von Hanxleden (rvh@informatik.uni-kiel.de)
Niklas Rentz (nre@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 Niklas (nre@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

Embedded and Real-Time

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.

Mladen Skelin and Marc Geilen. Compositionality in scenario-aware dataflow: a rendezvous perspective. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGPLAN/SIGBED International Conference on Languages, Compilers, and Tools for Embedded Systems (LCTES 2018). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2018.

N. A. Carreón, A. Gilbreath and R. Lysecky, Statistical Time-based Intrusion Detection in Embedded Systems, 2020 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE), Grenoble, France, 2020, pp. 562-567, doi: 10.23919/DATE48585.2020.9116369.

P. Fradet, A. Girault, A. 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, 2023, pp. 76 - 86, doi: 10.1145/3589610.3596280.

M.Lohstroh, E. A. Lee, S. Edwards. 2023 "Logical Time for Reactive Software" In Proceedings of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things Week 2023 (CPS-IoT Week '23 ). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2023, pp. 313 - 318, doi:10.1145/3576914.358749.

S. Bateni et al., "Risk and Mitigation of Nondeterminism in Distributed Cyber-Physical Systems". 2023 21st ACM-IEEE International Symposium on Formal Methods and Models for System Design (MEMOCODE), Hamburg, Germany, 2023, pp. 1-11.

Railway

[assigned] Bougacha, R., Wakrime, A. A., Kallel, S., Ayed, R. B., & Dutilleul, S. C. (2019, May). A Model-based Approach for the Modeling and the Verification of Railway Signaling System. In ENASE (pp. 367-376).

[assigned] P. Sun, S. Collart-dutilleul and P. Bon, "A model pattern of railway interlocking system by Petri nets," 2015 International Conference on Models and Technologies for Intelligent Transportation Systems (MT-ITS), Budapest, Hungary, 2015, pp. 442-449, doi: 10.1109/MTITS.2015.7223292.

[assigned] Hertel, B.; Pagenkopf, J.; König, J. "Challenges in the (Re-)Connection of Peripheral Areas to the Rail Network from a Rolling Stock Perspective: The Case of Germany." Vehicles 2023, 5, pp. 1138-1148. https://doi.org/10.3390/vehicles5030063

There are more bachelor recommendations that are not publicly available on the subpage for non-public papers, to view them please log in with your LDAP credentials.

Master Recommendations

Embedded and Real-Time

J. Axelsson and A. Kobetski, Towards a risk analysis method for systems-of-systems based on systems thinking. 2018 Annual IEEE International Systems Conference (SysCon), 2018, pp. 1-8, doi: 10.1109/SYSCON.2018.8369501.

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.

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.

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.

Railway

Ferlin, A., Qiu, S., Bon, P., Sallak, M., Dutilleul, S. C., Schön, W., & Cherfi-Boulanger, Z. (2018). An automated method for the study of human reliability in railway supervision systems. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 19(10), 3360-3375.

[assigned] Peleska, Jan, Anne E. Haxthausen, and Thierry Lecomte. "Standardisation considerations for autonomous train control." Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods, Verification and Validation. Practice: 11th International Symposium, ISoLA 2022, Rhodes, Greece, October 22–30, 2022, Proceedings, Part IV. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2022.

Basile, D., ter Beek, M.H., Legay, A. (2020). Strategy Synthesis for Autonomous Driving in a Moving Block Railway System with Uppaal Stratego. In: Gotsman, A., Sokolova, A. (eds) Formal Techniques for Distributed Objects, Components, and Systems. FORTE 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12136. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-50086-3_1

G. Krummenacher, C. S. Ong, S. Koller, S. Kobayashi and J. M. Buhmann, "Wheel Defect Detection With Machine Learning," in IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 1176-1187, April 2018, doi: 10.1109/TITS.2017.2720721.

Anne E. Haxthausen, Jan Peleska, and Sebastian Kinder. 2011. A formal approach for the construction and verification of railway control systems. Form. Asp. Comput. 23, 2 (Mar 2011), 191–219. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00165-009-0143-6

There are more master recommendations that are not publicly available on the subpage for non-public papers, to view them please log in with your LDAP credentials.

Schedule

Dates in the semester

The Final Presentations

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

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 building with bad 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