On the Trade-offs between Generalization and Specialization in Real-Time Systems

While academia favours general research that is applicable to a large class of systems, this paper highlights the necessity of research into specific scenarios and aims to increase its acceptance in the real-time systems community. We argue that such research is not only motivated by greater applicability to industry, but that specialization can also provide valuable information from a purely academic perspective. In addition, the trade-offs between generalization and specialization are examined, considering not only theoretical performance, but also the impact on essential non-functional properties that are important for industry, namely composability, robustness, extensibility, and parametric simplicity.