Tobias Stark (né Blass)

• LinkedIn • Google Scholar • ORCID

Informal Writing

I occasionally write articles on the Apex.AI blog:

• "A Journey from Microcontrollers to Microprocessors with AUTOSAR & ROS", a blog-form summary of our paper "A Middleware Journey from Microcontrollers to Microprocessors" published at DATE 2022.

PhD research

My PhD research focused on the practical application of real-time theory in highly dynamic systems, in particular mobile robots using ROS 2. These systems are characterized by strongly varying execution times, unpredictable environments, complex software stacks, and extensive reuse of preexisting standard components. Traditional real-time techniques like ahead-of-time schedulability analysis are therefore difficult to apply and require prohibitive effort.

To address this problem, I worked on mechanisms for developing latency-sensitive and (soft) real-time applications that are easy to use, can adapt to changing situations, and support compositional software construction.

From 2019 to 2021, I organized the Real-Time Systems Reading Group at MPI-SWS, previously led by Arpan Gujarati.

Publications

• D. Dasari, M. Becker, D. Casini, and T. Blass, "End-to-End Analysis of Event Chains under the QNX Adaptive Partitioning Scheduler", Proceedings of the 28th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2022), May 2022
  PDF
• T. Blass, D. Casini, S. Bozhko, and B. Brandenburg, “A ROS 2 Response-Time Analysis Exploiting Starvation Freedom and Execution-Time Variance”, Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium (RTSS 2021), December 2021.
  Erratum: the paper has been revised to correct Theorem 3.
  PDF | Slides (PDF) | Slides (PowerPoint) | bibtex

   
  @inproceedings{blassROSResponseTimeAnalysis2021,
    title = {A ROS 2 Response-Time Analysis Exploiting Starvation Freedom and Execution-Time Variance},
    booktitle = {Proceedings of the 42nd {{Real}}-Time {{Systems Symposium}} ({{RTSS}})},
    author = {Blass, Tobias and Casini, Daniel and Bozhko, Sergey and Brandenburg, Bj{\"o}rn B.},
    year = {2021}
  }
  	   

• T. Blass, A. Hamann, R. Lange, D. Ziegenbein, and B. Brandenburg, “Automatic Latency Management for ROS 2: Benefits, Challenges, and Open Problems”, Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS 2021), pp. 264-277, May 2021.
  
  PDF | Slides (PDF) | Slides (PowerPoint) | bibtex

 
@inproceedings{blassAutomaticLatencyManagement2021,
  title = {Automatic Latency Management for ROS 2: Benefits, Challenges, and Open Problems},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS)},
  author = {Blass, Tobias and Hamann, Arne and Lange, Ralph and Ziegenbein, Dirk and Brandenburg, Bj{\"o}rn B.},
  year = {2021}
}
	   

• D. Casini, T. Blass, I. Lütkebohle, and B. Brandenburg, “Response-Time Analysis of ROS 2 Processing Chains under Reservation-Based Scheduling”, Proceedings of the 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2019), July 2019.
  Erratum: the paper has been revised to address an omission in Lemma 8.
  PDF | Source code | Slides (PDF) | Slides (PowerPoint) | bibtex

 
@inproceedings{casiniResponseTimeAnalysisROS2019,
  title = {Response-Time Analysis of ROS 2 Processing Chains Under Reservation-Based Scheduling},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 31st Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS)},
  author = {Casini, Daniel and Blass, Tobias and L{\"u}tkebohle, Ingo and Brandenburg, Bj{\"o}rn B.},
  year = {2019},
}
	   

• T. Blass, S. Hahn, and J. Reineke, "Write-back Caches in WCET Analysis", Proceedings of the 29th Euromicro Conference on Real-Time Systems (ECRTS 2017), July 2017.
  Outstanding Paper Award
  Open Access

Non-Peer-Reviewed Publications

• M. Pöhnl, C. Eltzschig and T. Blass, "Shared-Memory-Based Lock-Free Queues: The Key to Fast and Robust Communication on Safety-Critical Edge Devices", Proceedings of Cyber-Physical Systems and Internet of Things Week (CPS-IoT Week), 2023.
  Link
• M. Pöhnl, A. Tamisier and T. Blass, "A Middleware Journey from Microcontrollers to Microprocessors", Design, Automation, and Test in Europe (DATE), 2022.
  PDF

Theses

• Master's Thesis: Array-aware Cache Analysis for Write-through and Write-back Caches, December 2016.
  PDF | bibtex

	  
@misc{blassmsc,
  author = {Tobias Bla{\ss}},
  title = {Array-aware Cache Analysis for Write-through and Write-back Caches ({M}aster thesis)},
  month = {December},
  year = {2016},
  url = {https://t-blass.de/papers/master-thesis-tblass.pdf}
}
	  
	

• Bachelor's Thesis: AutoPCP: Exploring Automatic Lock Ceilings in PREEMPT_RT, March 2015.

Teaching

I have been a student TA for the following lectures

• Programming 1 (2012)
• System Architecture (2013, 2016)
• Theoretical Computer Science (2013)