OPERA 2026

4th Workshop on OPtimization for Embedded and ReAl-time systems (OPERA)

A Hot Topics Day workshop co-located with the 47th IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS).

The design of Real-Time and Embedded Systems is, by definition, subject to constraints:

• timing of the input, output, or both;
• minimal quality of the delivered output/service;
• limited energy, power, or processing/communication resources, and more.

The design space exploration is often driven by expert designers who make the design decisions based on their experience. Such a design phase, however, can be more systematically modeled as an optimization problem, as long as the goal of the design becomes a cost to be minimized. This enables the usage of standard solvers of optimization problems.

The complexity of such a phase, however, is affected by several dimensions, including:

• the size of the problem (e.g. the sample automotive application of the WATERS 2017 challenge composed by ~1000 functions and ~10000 shared variables);
• the accuracy of the model for the workload and the computing platform;
• the tolerable degree of approximation of the constraints.

Fundamentally, the nature of the design problem as described above never changed over time. Today, however, the rise of ML/AI methods as universal tools to solve optimization problems (and any other problem) without any guarantee on the quality of the solution, is challenging the sound practice of addressing the design phase with optimization.

This workshop aims at being a venue in which researchers from the academia and industry working on real-time constraints, design-space exploration, complexity and optimization, meet to share ideas, problems, and solutions.

Important Dates

Call for Papers

Type of submissions

This workshop seeks a diversified program bridging established results with recent challenges. For this reason, we welcome multiple types of contributions:

• Original contributions.
• Preliminary ideas, not necessarily mature, seeking feedback from the community.
• Short versions of previously published research, relevant to the field. This may include journal articles not yet presented, or research originally presented to other communities.

Submissions should be in a double-column format, and double-blinded. The format is otherwise very lightweight and permissive: from two pages upwards with a flexible page limit (be sure to discuss beforehand with the workshop chairs if you plan on submitting eight or more pages).

Policy on the use of Generative AI

We adhere to the TCRTS policy on the responsible use of Generative AI, including:

“[The use of Generative-AI tools] must be disclosed in the acknowledgments. This disclosure is required to state which Generative-AI tools were used, as well as providing a detailed cross reference to the text (e.g. paragraphs, subsections, sections), diagrams, images, and underpinning research (e.g. code, implementations) that the Generative-AI assisted in the creation of.”

Publication of the workshop material

Accepted papers will be informally published on the workshop webpage. Authors will retain the copyright of their submitted material, and are free to submit it elsewhere.

Submission Page

Please submit your contributions on the site:

Coming soon

Organizers

Program Chairs

Tanya Amert, Carleton College, USA

Catherine Nemitz, Davidson College, USA

Program Committee

Shareef Ahmed, University of South Florida

Alessandro Biondi, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Pisa, Italy

Hoon Sung Chwa, DGIST, South Korea

Max A. Deppert, Kiel University, Germany

Zheng Dong, Wayne State University, USA

Junjie Shi, TU Dortmund, Germany

Binqi Sun, Technical University of Munich, Germany

Houssam-eddine Zahaf, Nantes University, France