SUNY REAL-TIME COURSE

  • Real-time Course at the State University of New York (SUNY), Plattsburgh NY

    • - “A Model Railroad for Ada and Software Engineering”, Communications of the ACM, November 1992
    - POC John W. McCormick, Ph.D.

  • Teams of 3-4 students design and build real-time model railroad control system

    • - Students have background in Pascal or Modula-2
    - 5,000-15,000 lines of code
    - 30-60 loosely coupled threads of control
    - 27 independently powered blocks of track
    - 6 reversing loops, 25 turnouts (switches)
    - 150 toggle switches would be needed to manually control layout

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From the Script: SLIDE 48 - SUNY Real-Time Course

This is a real-time course taught at the State University of New York (SUNY) where teams of three to four students design and build a real-time model railroad control system.

This slide provides the background on the course project, students and requirements. The next two slides provide some results and comments from the Professor. More details on this effort can be found in the article, "A Model Railroad for Ada and Software Engineering," Communications of the ACM, November 1992 by John W. McCormick, Ph.D. See also http://www.acm.sigada/news/suny.html

These are some of the more significant requirements and/or constraints that are imposed on the students.

Basically, you can see that the students knew neither C nor Ada; that the project is large enough to require team-work to complete it; and that the project is heavily real-time and control oriented.