4th Congress on Real-Time Development
a Review

From the 2nd to 3rd May, INCHRON GmbH gathered the real-time community during the 4th Congress on Real-Time Development in Munich. The event provided a platform for 60 decision makers, project leaders and developers of real-time critical applications to meet with high-calibre presenters, keynote speakers and exhibitors. During the Congress itself as well as during the "Meet the Experts" event on the eve of the Congress, active business relationships were forged, experiences exchanged and valuable insights into the management of embedded systems shared.

The event started with an all-day INCHRON Tool-Suite training course at the INCHRON offices in Munich-Garching, followed by the Meet the Experts evening in a very relaxed atmosphere. Wolfgang Sczygiol, CEO of Brose-SEW, gave an overview of the electric vehicles market worldwide and a critical assessment of the prospects of car manufacturers failing to invest enough in this area.

Participants continued their intense exchange of experiences during the next day's Congress at Lehel Carré in Munich. A particular highlight: the keynote by Dr. Karl Fuchs, Continental, in which he demonstrated how the error density in the development phase of a project is an early indicator of whether the project will be on schedule. The way to reduce the error density is to manage complexity with the help of model-based development thereby enabling early error detection.

The keynote was followed by seven high-profile lectures - starting with Dr. Christian Salzmann, who outlined BMW's strategy for greater software reuse. In Dr. Salzmann's view this would require greater standardization and an iterative, collaborative development process. Ralph Mader, Continental, introduced the audience to the complexity of engine control units. He went on to lecture about various strategies to take advantage of multicore processing for these ECUs. He concluded that the ideal distribution of computing tasks to the cores needs to be determined individually for each project using chronSIM. Florian Huber of Sensor Technik Wiedemann described by means of practical examples how to test and optimize the safety-critical battery charging process during real-time simulation.

The lunch break gave more opportunity for lively discussions among participants, speakers and exhibitors, followed by a presentation by Martin Stockl, an embedded systems expert with IBM Rational Germany. Stockl treated the audience to an overview of Jazz-based integrated solutions which, as he illustrated, allow for the simple integration of the INCHRON Tool-Suite. Next up was Jan Meyer from automotive supplier Hella, who illustrated the substantial efficiency gains that can be achieved by combining INCHRON's tools with IBM's Rhapsody and tight integration with a model-based development process.

Stefan Hohrein and H J Elsäβer engaged in a lively dialogue about how Continental in Schwalbach integrated three functions in a new AUTOSAR-based controller - and managed to estimate and optimize the required maximum computing performance even before the implementation phase. During the final presentation, INCHRON founders Dr. Ralf Münzenberger and Matthias Dörfel expressed their views on when and why timing became so important. They concluded the two-day conference with a declaration of love to real-time - which they see as the heartbeat of an embedded system.

Conclusion: The 4th Congress on Real-Time Development has again succeeded in inspiring a lively debate between users and real-time experts. We would like to thank all participants, speakers and exhibitors IBM Rational, ServiceXperts and Elektrobit for their interest and support!