An actual industrial problem, described in way academics can understand, made public, can help steer research towards reality.
Research aiming to be relevant to reality needs proper evaluations, ideally of actual industrial problems. In my experience, this is often hindered by
- IPR – I found that the closer we get to actual industrial problems, the less are we allowed to talk about it. Contributions can provide competitive advantage, which should not get public, neither should the specific settings, as they might give away internal secrets.
- The languages of industrialists and academics do not always overlap, they have different purposes. Solutions for specific problems might exist, but formulated in a different way.
ECRTS addressed the issues by providing “Industrial Challenges“, use cases from reality, in which an industrialist and an academic would work together. The industrialist would “sanitize” the technical problem, e.g. changing names, so IPR issues could not arise, while keeping the essence of the problem. The academic would then ensure, in discussion with the industrialist, that the problem was formulated in a language accessible to the scientific community.
That way, industry can get solutions to problems without the actual engineers having to dig through the scientific state-of-the-art and the academics could evaluated their work closer to reality. One of them particular, the challenge by Bosch, has been used frequently, showing its impact, to the point that there is now the next version of it.
The ECRTS industrial challenges were initiated by Sophie Quinton, first in the form of the formal verification challenge, then as part of the WATERS workshop along with a forum for its discussion.
The Bosch industrial challenge was proposed by Arne Hamann, Simon Kramer, Martin Lukasiewycz, Michael Pressler, Dakshina Dasari, Falk Wurst and Dirk Ziegenbein from Bosch GmbH. in WATERS 2016, then extended and evolved in WATERS 2017, and 2019.
Based on its success, a new version was introduced at RTAS 2026, to include recent research challenges:
P. Pazzaglia, K. Schmidt, L. Beermann, D. Ziegenbein, and A. Hamann, “Physics-Driven Real-Time CPS Challenge,” in Proceedings of the IEEE Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS), Saint-Malo, France, IEEE, 2026.
The accompanying open-source code (challenge benchmark and reference implementation) is available at:
https://github.com/boschresearch/CPSChallenge