Graduate Course: Reactive and Real-Time Systems

This article describes a graduate course on the subject of \Reactive and Real-Time Systems", which serves as the basis for courses taught by the authors at Bar-Ilan University and at Tel-Aviv University, and undergraduate course at the Netania Academic College and The Academic College of Tel-Aviv-Yaao. The course focuses on the development of provably correct reactive or real-time systems. It is mainly a theoretical course, hence the students do not build (even the simplest) systems. Still, we try to make things as tangible as possible. This means that all the mathematical and logical frameworks introduced are followed by presentation of software tools that implement them. This course is planned so that no purchasing of special hardware and/or software is needed. All the software tools used are freely available from various Inter-net sites and can be installed quite easily. This should make our course attractive to institutions and instructors for which purchasing and maintaining a special lab is not feasible for budget, space or time limitations (as in our case).