ECRTS is the premier European venue in the area of real-time systems and, alongside RTSS and RTAS, ranks as one of the top three international conferences on this topic. ECRTS has a rich history, with the first edition held in 1989 and this year’s edition being the 37th run of this annual event. As in previous editions, ECRTS attracts researchers from both academia and industry whose work tackles foundational and practical challenges at the intersection of real-time scheduling, time-critical systems, real-time operating systems, hardware/software co-design, security in time-sensitive systems, real-time networking, AI and machine learning methods for real-time systems, and more.  

ECRTS 2025 will be held as a physical conference on July 8-11, 2025 in Brussels, Belgium.

Scope and topics of interest

Papers on all aspects of timing requirements in computer systems are welcome. Systems of interest include not only hard real-time systems but also time-sensitive systems in general (e.g., systems with soft requirements expressed in terms of tail latency, latency SLAs, QoS expectations, etc.). Typical applications are found not only in classical embedded and cyber-physical systems, but also increasingly in cloud or edge computing contexts and often stem from domains such as automotive, avionics, telecommunications, healthcare, robotics, and space systems, among others.

To be in scope, papers must address some form of timing requirement, broadly construed. Prospective first-time authors are encouraged to familiarize themselves with works accepted in past editions of the conference, which are publicly available at drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/conference/ECRTS

ECRTS welcomes theoretical and practical contributions (including tools, benchmarks, and case studies) to the state of the art in the design, implementation, verification, and validation of time-sensitive systems. We particularly encourage papers on industrial case studies (such as the examples at ecrts.org/industrial-challenge) and the application of real-time technology to real systems. We welcome practical contributions even without novel theoretical insights or formal proofs, provided they are of interest to the research community and/or industry. Whenever relevant, we encourage authors to present experimental results (preferably based on real data, but synthetic test cases are acceptable when adequately motivated).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

    all elements of time-sensitive  SOFTWARE SYSTEMS, including operating systems, hypervisors, middlewares and frameworks, programming languages and compilers, runtime environments, networks and communication protocols, etc.;
    COMPUTER HARDWARE design and hardware/software integration for embedded systems, including time-predictable hardware architecture, GPU and accelerators, FPGA prototyping, SoC design, novel memory architectures, hardware/software co-design, etc.;
    REAL-TIME NETWORKS: including wired and wireless sensor and actuator networks, Time-Sensitive Networks (TSN), industrial IoT, Software Defined Network (SDN), 5G, end-to-end latency analysis, etc.;
    REAL-TIME APPLICATIONS, including modeling, design, simulation, testing, debugging, and evaluation in domains such as automotive, avionics, control systems, industrial automation, robotics, space, railways telecommunications, multimedia, etc.;
    foundational SCHEDULING and PREDICTABILITY questions, including schedulability analysis, algorithm design, synchronization protocols, computational complexity, temporal isolation, probabilistic guarantees, multi-core scheduling, resource co-scheduling, etc.;
    static and dynamic techniques for RESOURCE DEMAND ESTIMATION, including stochastic and classic worst-case execution time (WCET) analysis, analyses to bound memory and bandwidth needs, and methods for determining the energy, power, or thermal footprint of real-time applications, etc.;
    MACHINE LEARNING techniques in safety-critical systems, including explainable AI, the application of machine learning to the design and optimization of real-time systems, methods for real-time AI computing, etc.;
    FORMAL METHODS for the verification and validation of real-time systems, including model checking, computer-assisted proofs, and runtime monitoring systems, etc.;
    SECURITY aspects of real-time systems, including techniques to strengthen security guarantees, concerns that affect the operation of safety-critical systems, privacy-enhancing techniques, methodologies to protect the temporal envelope of critical software against malicious threats, etc.;
    the interplay of timing predictability and other NON-FUNCTIONAL QUALITIES such as reliability, quality of control, energy/power consumption, environmental impact, testability, scalability, etc.

The above list of topics is intended only as a coarse summary of recent proceedings and should not be understood as an exclusive list of interests. On the contrary, papers breaking new ground, departing from established subfields, or challenging the status quo are most welcome and highly encouraged.