The inaugural meeting of The Open Group Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum was attended by 70 individuals from 50 different organizations.

It was recognized that this forum can be key in accelerating the proliferation of embedded systems through development of test and certification programs.

Key speakers from the Real-time industry attended the meeting outlining current trends in the industry and providing input to the Forum workplan. These included representatives from the following organizations: Boeing (Richard Paine), Wind River (John Fogelin), QNX (Steve Furr) , FSMLabs (Victor Yodaiken), LynuxWorks (Mitch Bunnell), Venturcom (Myron Zimmerman) , NCITS-R1 (Russ Richards), US Army (Bill Protzman), Mitre Corporation (Doug Jensen), OS JTF (Lt Col Glenn Logan, Curtis Royster,Jr.), The Aerospace Corp (Sam Bowser), TimeSys (Mark Gerhardt), UDI Project/Interphase (Kevin Quick) , Mitre/OMG (Dave Emery) and The Open Group (Dave Lounsbury).

The concept of the Real-time and Embedded System Forum as a meeting place for coordination between suppliers, practitioners and existing industry standard groups has been firmly established at this meeting. Industry groups identified to work with, and represented at the inaugural meeting included IEEE PASC, The Society of Automotive Engineers, The Object Management Group, NCITS R1 and the UDI Project.

Prior to the meeting, and included with the meeting materials was a prospectus for the Forum. During the meeting, sub-groups were formed to validate the proposals in the prospectus and positions put forward by the champions and to propose further action by The Open Group Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum.

The break-out groups have validated that the following key areas are clearly problems where work needs to be done:

• Testing and certification for Real-time systems and applications , and possibly performance measures/testing. Scope includes POSIX profiles, and possibly CORBA.
• New Ways to specify behavior. Work is needed in the area of API specification to indicate application real-time requirements to the implementations and to indicate to applications the real-time performance of implementation supplied components. This could include the definition of parameters in the API itself such as a time/resource constraint for completing an operation and operations to query components on the real-time performance they offer.
• Security for Real-time and Embedded Systems. The intersection of security requirements with real-time and embedded systems requirements needs to be better defined, for example how do you handle audit logs on an embedded system with no filesystem or network?

The next steps:

The forum will be officially launched on July 31.

The next steps will be the formation of a steering committee and workgroups for each activity. There needs to be agreement on specific working groups to address key topics .

The Open Group will analyze the output from the meeting and working with the Founder members of the Real-time and Embedded Systems Forum will propose a forward work plan. Statements of work for each area will be drafted and subgroups should meet either face to face, or by teleconference prior to the next plenary.