Alan Burns
Home Page


Professor Alan Burns is a member of the Department of Computer Science, University of York, U.K. His research interests cover a number of aspects of real-time systems including the assessment of languages for use in the real-time domain, distributed operating systems, the formal specification of scheduling algorithms and implementation strategies, and the design of dependable user interfaces to real-time applications. Professor Burns has authored/co-authored 581 papers/reports and books. Most of these are in the real-time area. His teaching activities include courses in Operating Systems and Real-time Systems. In 2009 Professor Burns was elected a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering. In 2012 he was elected a Fellow of the IEEE.

A small selection of published papers follow:

A. Burns and A.J. Wellings, A Schedulability Compatible Multiprocessor Resource Sharing Protocol – MrsP, Proceedings of ECRTS, pp282—291, 2013. Author’s copy is available. This paper defines a new synchronisation protocol for multiprocessor systems based on critical sections being executed by any of the tasks waiting to gain access to the critical section.

A. Burns, M. Gutierrez, M. Aldea and M. Gonzalez-Harbour, A Deadline-Floor Inheritance Protocol for EDF Scheduled Embedded Real-Time Systems with Resource Sharing. IEEE Transaction on Computers; available (FREE) from the IEEE. This paper defines a synchronisation protocol (DFP) for single processor systems scheduled by EDF. It is an alternative to the Stack Resource Protocol (SRP). A technical report is also available on DFP.

A. Burns, R.I. Davis, P. Wang and F. Zhang, Partitioned EDF Scheduling for Multiprocessors using a C=D Scheme, 18th RTNS, pp169-178, 2010. An extended journal version of this paper (with the same title) is available from the Real-Time Systems Journal, Vol 48 No 1, pp3-33 (2012).

S.K. Baruah and A. Burns and R. I. Davis, Response-Time Analysis for Mixed Criticality Systems, RTSS 2011, pp34-43, 2011.

A. Burns and B. Littlewood, Reasoning about the Reliability of Multi-Version, Diverse Real-Time Systems, Proceeding of the 31st IEEE Real-Time Systems Symposium, pp73-8, 2010.

A. Burns  and I. J. Hayes, A Timeband Framework for Modelling Real-Time Systems, Real-Time Systems Journal, Vol 45, pp106-142, 2010. An up-to-date report on timebands is available as a department technical report, YCS 467.

F. Zhang and A. Burns, Schedulability Analysis for Real-Time Systems with EDF Scheduling, IEEE Transactions on Computers, Vol 58, No 9, pp1250-1258, 2009.

Z. Shi and A. Burns, Real-Time Communication Analysis for On-Chip Networks with Wormhole Switching, Proceeding of the IEEE International Symposium on Networks-on-Chip (NoCS), pp161-170, 2008.


Here is a position paper on Predictability as an Emergent Behaviour  -- 4th Workshop on Compositional Theory and Technology for Real-Time Embedded Systems, pp27-29 (2011).


Here is a review paper on Mixed Criticality Systems (13th edition) -- this has been produced as part of the EPSRC funded projects MCC and MCCps.


Professor Burns can be found in office CSE/118. You can email him using alan.burns within york.ac.uk.


Recent Books: Concurrent Programming, Concurrency in Ada, HRT-HOOD, Concurrent and Real-Time Programming in Ada and a fourth edition of Real-Time Systems and Programming Languages.


Information on Pascal-FC: a teaching language for concurrent programming.


A report on the Ravenscar Profile has just published as a Departmental Yellow Report (YCS-2003-348.pdf). This is available from our ftp site.


He is a member of the Real-Time Research Group at York.


A. Burns, DPhil, CEng, FBCS, CITP, FIET, FREng, FIEEE
Department of Computer Science,
Deramore Lane,
University of York,
YORK,
YO1 5GH,
UK.

Telephone +44 (0) 1904 325529