Welcome adresse by ERTS program committee chair

On behalf of the ERTS- Organizing and Program Committees, it is my pleasure to invite you to contribute and to attend the 13^th edition of the Embedded Real-Time Systems Congress.

ERTS is widely recognized as a major cross-sector event for the research and practice of resilient and real-time embedded critical systems. It is a unique bi-annual forum that has gathered researchers, engineers and professionals from a wide variety of application domains, for more than two decades, to address timely challenges related to the design, validation, assessment and operation of embedded critical systems and applications, and to reflect on key future trends.

Critical embedded systems are deployed in several industrial application sectors such as transportation (avionics, automotive, railways …), space, defense, energy, smart cities, etc. Such systems are required to deliver trustworthy, resilient and timely services while achieving high levels of performance at the lowest costs. Achieving such requirements requires the development of innovative solutions to address various challenges raised today. We can mention first the need to investigate the impact of the new technological trends that include the advent of heterogeneous processor architecture including GPU and IA accelerator components, as well as virtualization and edge computing techniques with the development of new services with distributed processing and storage on remote infrastructures, using advanced communication terrestrial and non-terrestrial technologies (5G, V2X, IoT, UWB, etc.). These evolutions enabling services on demand, led to increase the complexity of the systems, as well as the risks of failures or degradation of performances that result from accidental causes or malicious attacks.

A major challenge is related to the growing interest in integrating artificial intelligence algorithms into mission-critical applications to achieve increasing levels of autonomy, flexibility and adaptation to changes and unforseen events.  Machine learning algorithms have demonstrated high accuracy for tasks like object recognition and classification, but the current knowledge does not yet ensure the necessary guarantees for certifying systems in mission-critical domains. These algorithms assume the training data is representative of real-world inputs, but unexpected perturbations and hardware faults can violate this assumption. A major goal of current research is to develop innovative solutions for the problem of establishing guarantees of reliability, security, safety, robustness and better explainability for systems that incorporate increasingly complex ML models, and for the challenge of determining whether such systems can comply with requirements for safety-critical systems. This includes for example defining new paradigms for the design, verification and systems level assurance of embeddable and certifiable AI architectures as well as the design of new processor chips to be used for AI critical applications.

In addition, the use of AI techniques such as generative models and virtual assistants to support the efficient design and optimization of critical embedded systems requires careful investigation, especially when the implemented systems need to be certified or comply with stringent development assurance and regulation constraints. The recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has significantly enhanced the capabilities of AI, enabling more sophisticated and accurate generative models. These advancements open the opportunity to use LLMs to facilitate the creation of highly efficient and optimized systems, reducing development time and costs. Moreover, LLMs can assist in ensuring compliance with regulatory standards by providing thorough documentation and validation support. The challenge remains on how to apply them in an efficient and safe manner in system development. This requires the design of innovative solutions to provide sufficient confidence that the integration of LLMs in the design process not only can improve system performance but also enhance reliability and safety, making them invaluable in the development of critical embedded systems.

Cybersecurity is another challenging area where significant scientific advances are needed to cope with the increase, in number and sophistication, of malicious threats targeting critical infrastructures and systems. Vulnerabilities span all system layers, and increasingly the lower layers and the hardware. Hardware assisted protection techniques and trustworthy embedded components are among the promising solutions being explored, together with new paradigms that consider security and safety holistically.  In addition, personal data protection and privacy have also become a real industrial and societal concern due to the massive collection of data and the requirement to demonstrate compliance with the GDPR.

Another major challenge arising from the geopolitical environment is managing the sovereignty of critical embedded systems, where Europe plays a significant role in the transportation and space industries. Beyond open-source software and tooling, emerging open-hardware initiatives, the engineering ecosystem, new competence consolidation, and data repositories with safe and reliable development processes need to be organized to achieve this objective by strengthening collaboration. Industry domains are organizing themselves to collaborate on noncompetitive hardware or software solutions to boost productivity and promote innovation. Among such, ecosystem safety, cybersecurity and resilience of critical embedded system.

Finally, developing sustainable and energy efficient solutions to reduce the environmental impact of future generations of critical systems and ensuring their social acceptability is nowadays a major concern and an important objective to achieve in all application sectors.

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Toulouse in February 2026 for the 13^th edition of the ERTS Congress to exchange about these topics and your recent contributions !