------------------------------------------------------------------------

 FORMAL MODELS FOR RECURRING REAL-TIME TASKS

 Sanjoy Baruah
 The University of North Carolina

 ABSTRACT:
         In designing abstract models for representing hard-real-time
 application systems, one is driven by two -- often contradictory --
 concerns. On the one hand, it is desirable that the models be general
 enough to be able to accurately represent the relevant characteristics
 of the application systems being modeled; on the other, it is absolutely
 imperative that formal analysis (in particular, feasibility analysis) be
 computationally tractable. I will survey current models from this
 perspective, and will describe attempts at designing ever more general
 models subject to the constraint that the associated feasibility
 analysis problem remain tractable.

 BIO:
         Sanjoy Baruah is an associate professor in the Department of
 Computer Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He
 holds a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin,
 and has previously been affiliated with the University of Vermont and
 the New Jersey Institute of Technology.  His research interests are in
 real-time and safety-critical system design, scheduling theory, and
 resource allocation and sharing in distributed computing environments.