Motivation

Concurrent, distributed, and cyber-physical software systems all have behaviors that depend on timing. Aspects of time are of interest to the broad CPS/IoT community, but they rarely play an explicit role in the semantics of software systems. Instead, timing is usually an emergent property of an implementation. This workshop will focus on several bodies of work at various institutions worldwide that put time front-and-center in programming models and languages. Recently, there has been a flurry of activity introducing new programming languages and models, such as Timed C, Lingua Franca, the Sparse Synchronous Model, PRET-C, and SCCharts. The goal of the workshop is to exchange experiences and ideas, to compare the variety of approaches, and to identify the most promising opportunities and the most challenging obstacles.

Technical issues of interest include models of time (total and partial orders, dense, superdense, etc.), programming language constructs representing time, time in distributed systems, analysis and verification of temporal properties of programs, logical vs. physical time, clock synchronization, time and concurrency, scheduling, time in resource-constrained embedded systems, application studies, etc. More generally, we hope to build a community around a long-term vision, which is that modern computing needs abstractions for time in all layers of our technology stacks, ranging from programming languages and compilers all the way down to networks and microprocessor architectures. This workshop is meant to attract contributors broadly interested in exploring models, languages, tools and design methodologies for time-centric reactive systems.

Format and Logistics

The workshop is planned to be a full-day event. The program is expected to consist of about a dozen presented papers and one or two invited/keynote talks. Since this is the first iteration of this workshop, it will be hard to predict how many submissions we will receive. We solicit both invited papers and regular uninvited submissions; all will be subject to peer-review. The proceedings will be published by the ACM.