Ada-Belgium is a non-profit volunteer organization whose purpose is to promote the use in Belgium of the Ada programming language, the first ISO standardized object-oriented language.

Ada offers commercial developers an ideal blend of consistency, maturity, reliability, and performance. Ada supports the creativity and innovation of top technical talent while providing the discipline and engineering required for critical software systems. No other language is as uniquely qualified for building viable, cost-effective, long-term software solutions. It is a choice you need to consider.

From: "Ada - The Language For A Complex World" (Ada Resource Association)

Highlights

• Theme of Ada-Belgium'98 is "Concurrency & Real-Time". We will have a mix of longer tutorial like presentations and shorter experience reports or product presentations, given by speakers both from the s.c. Ada vendors and the Ada users.

• Free Ada-related material will be distributed, a.o. the new Walnut Creek double CD-ROM (the November 1998 release is a special edition for SIGAda'98 and Ada-Belgium'98).

• All presentations are in English. Everyone interested is welcome.

Here you will find:

• the full programme,
• abstracts of the talks,
• a short biography of the speakers,
• information on their company/organization,
• free Ada CD-ROMs,
• documentation that will be handed out,
• the location of the seminar,
• the participation fee,
• the seminar secretariat,
• acknowledgements.

The annual Ada-Belgium Seminar is an event not to be missed! Do not delay to register!
(And be sure to request your FREE copies of the Ada CD-ROMs.)

Looking forward to meet many of you in Brussels.

Dirk Craeynest
Ada-Belgium Board
ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.ac.be

Programme

08:30 - 09:30   Registration

09:30 - 09:35   Welcome (Ada-Belgium)

09:35 - 10:20   Tutorial - Part 1:
    [0h45]      "Real-Time and Safety-Critical Features of Ada95"
                by Brian Dobbing, Aonix Europe Limited, U.K.

10:20 - 11:00   Technical Presentation:
    [0h40]      "Control Your System from Day One"
                by Fernand Quartier, Spacebel, Belgium

11:00 - 11:30   Coffee break

11:30 - 12:30   Technical Vendor Presentation:
    [1h00]      "GNAT Goes Embedded: GNATWORKS, GNORT and JGNAT"
                by Geert Bosch, ACT-Europe, France

12:30 - 13:00   Experience Report:
    [0h30]      "Ada Experience in ITEC"
                by Wiljan Derks, Philips, Discrete Semiconductors, ITEC,
                the Netherlands

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

13:00 - 14:00   Lunch
14:00 - 14:30   Coffee break

-------------
14:30 - 14:55   Technical Presentation:
    [0h25]      "A Fully Reusable Class of Objects for Synchronization
                and Communication in Ada 95"
                by Patrick de Bondeli, France

14:55 - 15:40   Tutorial - Part 2:
    [0h45]      "Real-Time and Safety-Critical Features of Ada95"
                by Brian Dobbing, Aonix Europe Limited, U.K.

15:40 - 16:10   Coffee break

16:10 - 17:10   Vendor Presentation:
    [1h00]      "Tools for Real-Time and High-Integrity"
                by Pierre Morere, Aonix France, France

17:10 - 17:30   Experience Report:
    [0h20]      "'Real-Time' vs. 'Cyclic' with Ada in a Railway Safety
                Application"
                by Alain Fontaine, Alstom, Belgium

17:30 - 17:35   Closing Remarks (Ada-Belgium)

18:00           End of the Seminar

Abstracts

Tutorial: "Real-Time and Safety-Critical Features of Ada95"
Brian Dobbing, Aonix Europe Limited, U.K.

The first part of this tutorial presents an overview of the real-time features of Ada95; primarily relating to concurrency, protection, timing and interrupts. This does not assume any prior knowledge of Ada95.

The second part of this tutorial presents current developments in standardizing a subset of Ada95 that includes concurrency, for use in domains such as safety-critical, high-integrity and hard real-time, as well as for general real-time and embedded systems.

"Control Your System from Day One"
Fernand Quartier, Spacebel, Belgium

The talk concerns improved design and validation methods.

Most developments concentrate on the timing aspects in the beginning and at the end of the project, often with disastrous consequences. For Spacebel, it is clear that the time dimension has to be integrated in all engineering and development phases of a project. When hard-real-time requirements are present, no kernel nor RTOS can provide a guaranteed solution.

Spacebel developed a number of original tools to assist the designer and developer:

• Schedulability Analyser (based on Ada95 and DMS theory)
• Scheduling Simulator (based on Ada95)
• Target Simulator, which is some sort of Software Super In-Circuit Emulator which allows non intrusive debugging and validation for C, assembler and Ada.

Some Ada compilers, such as the Aonix one, provide a possibility of generating Worst Case Execution Time Estimation, which can be used as an input to the HRT tools. Most important European space projects use or plan to use the Spacebel tools in their development life cycle. Other sectors will follow when quality and risk control requirements increase. More info can be found on the web (www.spacebel.be/products).

Technical Vendor Presentation: "GNAT Goes Embedded: GNATWORKS, GNORT and JGNAT"
Geert Bosch, ACT-Europe, France

This presentation focuses on new technologies that have been integrated in GNAT to target a wide selection of embedded systems, ranging from bare boards via GNATWORKS to embedded Java Virtual Machines.

Experience Report: "Ada Experience in ITEC"
Wiljan Derks, Philips, Discrete Semiconductors, ITEC, the Netherlands

The presentation explains who ITEC is and what equipment we make. The presentation goes through the steps that we performed to convert our former RTL/2 and Pascal applications into Ada95 applications running on Windows NT.

Technical Presentation: "A fully reusable class of objects for synchronization and communication in Ada 95"
Patrick de Bondeli, France

This presentation shows a framework consisting in a very general class which can be reused to specify and implement any type exporting synchronization or communication properties.

The new Ada 95 features modelling inheritance, polymorphism and hierarchies of library units are used extensively in describing the architecture of the framework and other new features (access to subprograms, protected types, ...) are used for the specification and implementation of the components of the framework. The implementation does not use exotic concurrent features (requeue, select with terminate or abort,...) and not even entry queueing; this should help reusing this framework in real-time applications.

The framework relies heavily on formal techniques, both for its construction and reuse principle.

The presentation is centered around a reuse case, but the attendance will be given a paper providing a reasonable description of this framework as a whole.

Vendor Presentation: "Tools for Real-Time and High-Integrity"
Pierre Morere, Aonix France, France

The presentation will present the strategy of Aonix regarding the Ada market.

Experience Report: "'Real-Time' vs. 'Cyclic' with Ada in a Railway Safety Application"
Alain Fontaine, Alstom, Charleroi, Belgium

The paper presented is a practitionist paper which describes the current architecture of our safety application. It discusses how real-time can be masked for application programmers for performing safety application with Ada. Emphasis is also put on tools, reuse, repository of software modules!

Biography of speakers

Brian Dobbing, Aonix Europe, U.K.

Brian is the architect and chief designer of the Aonix product line called "Raven" which is the realization of the Ravenscar Profile for targets such as PowerPC, MC680x0 and Intel families.

Brian was also a key member of the ISO U.K. delegation during the revision process of Ada that yielded the Ada95 definition. He had specific responsibility for reviewing the new real-time features of the language.

Fernand Quartier, Spacebel, Belgium

Geert Bosch, ACT-Europe, France

Wiljan Derks, Philips, Discrete Semiconductors, ITEC, the Netherlands

Patrick de Bondeli, France

He obtained a PhD ("Docteur-Ingenieur") in computer science from the University Paris VI (P. and M. Curie) in 1981.

Since 1981, Patrick de Bondeli has been engaged in R and D and consulting in software engineering for concurrent and real-time systems. He has, from the start, always been very active in the Ada world, installing the first Ada compiler to be imported in Europe (July 1983), participating in the Ada 9X program, and being an active member of Ada France and Ada in Switzerland (he is both Swiss and French).

His main current interests are :

• Concurrent and real-time systems,
• Formal techniques,
• Reusable software components,
• Object-oriented design and programming,
• Ada 95.

Pierre Morere, Aonix France, France

Alain Fontaine, Alstom, Belgium

Companies and Organizations

Aonix

http://www.aonix.fr/

Aonix is a major provider of lifecycle software-development tools and is one of the largest software tools companies in the world. Aonix currently has more than 20,000 installations with half a million users worldwide. The company was formed in November 1996 as a result of the merger of two successful development tools companies Thomson Software Products (formally Alsys and MUST Software), specializing in Ada and MIS tools, and Interactive Development Environments (IDE), an experienced player in the modeling, analysis and design tool market. The Aonix products and array of consulting services provide complete life-cycle solutions for analyzing requirements, designing, implementing, testing and deploying software for the most challenging commercial or technical projects. The comprehensive set of offerings address the most popular object-orientated and structured-development languages including Ada, C, C++, Java, IDL and others on a variety of development platforms.

Spacebel, Belgium

The speaker is active in the QuoVadis and ASAP section in Spacebel, Angleur. QuoVadis (standing for Quality Of service Validation, Assessment, Development & Integration systems), is a section in Spacebel that concentrates on tools to develop and improve the quality of service of computer systems, with a major emphasis on the design and control of timing aspects of systems. ASAP focuses on real-time parallel systems.

ACT Europe, France

ACT markets the GNAT Ada 95 development environment and provides assistance to projects that use this toolchain.

At ACT, we view our products as a service that we provide to our customers. We believe that high-quality, responsive support is a key ingredient of complex and reliable Ada software products. GNAT, the leading Ada 95 development system, is the only Ada solution that comes with outstanding support.

Our objective is to ensure that your project will succeed. This objective shapes all aspects of our business, from the open-system architecture to providing GNAT source code.

We are the only company in the Ada marketplace to make support the heart of our business, helping you reduce the time-to-market of systems developed with GNAT. We also provide consulting, training, and customization in all areas of Ada software development with a special emphasis on embedded systems.

Philips, Discrete Semiconductors, ITEC, the Netherlands

Philips semiconductor is split up into different business units. One of them is discrete semiconductors. ITEC is a support department for discrete semiconductors.

ITEC mainly focuses on processes and equipment for the assembly process of these products. This means that we develop equipment for manufacturing and also processes that are needed for the equipment.

For more information about Philips look at www.philips.com

Patrick de Bondeli, France

Alstom, Belgium

Free Ada CD-ROMs

Copies of the new 16th Edition of the Walnut Creek Ada CD-ROM set, bought by Ada-Belgium through an agreement with the Special Interest Group on Ada of the ACM (ACM SIGAda), will be freely distributed to the first registered participants, up to the amount available. (Last year we could satisfy all demands.) This CD-ROM set includes a.o. ports to lots of platforms of the GNU Ada 95 compiler (GNAT), and Aonix' Ada 95 Compiler and Environment for Windows 95. More information on this special CD-ROM edition for Ada-Belgium'98 is available separately.

Documentation

For this 8th Annual Seminar each participant will be offered, a.o., printed proceedings with papers related to the presentations. Moreover, copies of slides, and additional documents and papers will be distributed.

In addition to the free documentation, we are happy to announce that Addison-Wesley Longman Publishers will be present with a selection of their Ada publications. Books will be available for purchase at an attractive discount.

And finally, Ada-Belgium sponsor John Robinson & Associates, specialists in Ada 83, Ada 95, HOOD3 and UML training and consultancy, will attend the seminar to give information on their activities.

Location

The Seminar takes place at the premises of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.), Boulevard du Triomphe, Campus de la Plaine, B-1050 Brussels, Belgium.

Exact location of the Seminar is Auditorium C in the Forum on the Campus Plaine of the U.L.B.

See also "How to get there and where to stay?" Parking facilities are available.

Participation fee

4000 BEF for Ada-Belgium members
6000 BEF for non-members
Free registration for full-time students (without lunch)

The participation fee includes all coffee breaks and lunch, full documentation, and a free Walnut Creek Ada CD-ROM set (up to the amount available). Students can optionally pay for lunch.

The attached Registration Form has to be returned, signed, preferably before Monday November 30, 1998. Students may arrange registration in group through their institution.

Seminar secretariat

Ada-Belgium'98 Seminar Secretariat
Attn. Prof. R. Devillers
c/o Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.)
Boulevard du Triomphe / Triomflaan
Campus de la Plaine, CP 212, B-1050 Brussels 
Phone (32)-2-650.56.11, Fax (32)-2-650.56.09 
E-mail ada-belgium-board@cs.kuleuven.ac.be
WWW http://www.cs.kuleuven.ac.be/~dirk/ada-belgium/

To the Ada-Belgium home page. To the Ada-Belgium'98 Home Page.

Last update: 1998/11/27.