Holistic analysis of asynchronous real-time transactions with earliest deadline scheduling

In distributed real-time systems, an application is often modeled as a set of real-time transactions, where each transaction is a chain of precedence-constrained tasks. Each task is statically allocated to a processor, and tasks allocated on the same processor are handled by a single-processor scheduling algorithm. Precedence constraints among tasks of the same transaction are modeled by properly assigning scheduling parameters as offsets, jitters and intermediate deadlines.In this paper we address the problem of schedulability analysis of distributed real-time transactions under the earliest deadline first scheduling algorithm. We propose a novel methodology that reduces the pessimism introduced by previous methods by explicitly taking into account the offsets of the tasks. Moreover, we extend the analysis to account for blocking time due to shared resources. In particular, we propose two kinds of schedulability tests, CDO-TO and MDO-TO, and show, with an extensive set of simulations, that they provides improved schedulability conditions with respect to classical algorithms. Finally, we apply the methodology to an important class of systems: heterogeneous multiprocessor systems, with a general purpose processor and one or more coprocessors (DSPs).     

Generalized rate monotonic schedulability bounds using relative period ratios

One of the most well-studied scheduling algorithms for real-time systems is the Rate Monotonic (RM) scheduling for periodic tasks. In this paper we derive a generalized RM schedulability bound by considering relative period ratios among tasks in a system. We show that schedulability bounds published earlier are special cases of our generalized bound. Our new bound may provide a higher value than earlier results.     

On the convergence of the holistic analysis for EDF distributed systems

Dynamic scheduling techniques, and EDF (Earliest Deadline First) in particular, have demonstrated their ability to increase the schedulability of real time systems compared to fixed-priority scheduling. In distributed systems, the scheduling policies of the processing nodes tend to be the same as in stand-alone systems and, although few EDF networks exist, it is foreseen that dynamic scheduling will gradually develop into real-time networks. There are some response time analysis techniques for EDF scheduled distributed systems, mostly derived from the holistic analysis developed by Spuri. A major factor influencing the response time is the release jitter of each task, which is the maximum variation suffered by the release time of the task jobs. The convergence of the holistic analysis in the context of EDF distributed systems with shared resources had not been studied until now. There is a circular dependency between the task release jitter values, response times and the preemption level ceilings of shared resources. In this paper we present an extension of Spuri’s algorithm and we demonstrate that its iterative formulas are non-decreasing, even in the presence of shared resources. This result enables us to assert that the new algorithm converges towards a solution for the response times of the tasks and messages in a distributed system.¹     

面向AADL模型的存储资源约束可调度性分析

嵌入式实时系统在安全关键领域变得越来越重要,其广泛应用于航空航天、汽车电子等具有严格时间约束的实时系统中.随着嵌入式系统的复杂度越来越高,在系统开发的早期设计阶段就需要对其可调度性进行分析评估.系统中的存储资源会对可调度性产生一定影响,在抢占式实时嵌入式系统引入缓存后,任务的最坏执行时间可能发生变化.因此,分析缓存相关抢占延迟对实时嵌入式系统的可调度性影响一直以来是困扰大规模复杂系统架构设计的一个技术难题.本文提出了一种面向软件架构级别、基于抢占调度序列的缓存相关抢占延迟计算方法,用来分析缓存相关抢占延迟约束下AADL （架构分析和设计语言）模型的可调度性.论文扩展了AADL关于存储资源架构设计的模型元素,来支持对缓存属性进行建模,提出了一种基于模型构件进行抢占序列排序、缓存相关抢占延迟时间计算和被抢占任务最坏执行时间的估算方法,来对系统架构各功能构件在共享系统存储资源下系统的可调度性进行分析.论文还实现了分析缓存相关抢占延迟约束下的系统任务可调度性分析工具原型,并以某型飞机机载开放式智能信息系统为例,在航空电子系统架构设计中进行尝试,验证了该方法的在复杂系统设计中的对实时性分析的可行性.     

异构分布式系统混合型实时容错调度算法

基/副版本技术是实现实时分布式系统容错的一个重要手段。提出了一种异构分布式混合型容错模型,该模型与传统的异构分布式实时调度模型相比同时考虑了周期和非周期调度任务。在此基础上给出3种容错调度算法:以可调度性为目的SSA算法、以可靠性为目的RSA算法、以负载均衡性为目的BSA算法。算法能够在异构系统中同时调度具有周期和非周期容错需求的实时任务,且能够保证在异构系统中某节点机失效情况下,实时任务仍然能在截止时间内完成。最后从可调度性、可靠性代价、负载均衡性、周期与非周期任务数及任务周期与粒度J个方面对算法进行了分析。模拟实验结果显示算法各有优缺点,所以在选择调度算法时应该根据异构系统的特点来选择。     

Limited carry-in technique for real-time multi-core scheduling

Schedulability analysis has been widely studied to provide offline timing guarantees for a set of real-time tasks. The so-called limited carry-in technique, which can be orthogonally incorporated into many different multi-core schedulability analysis methods, was originally introduced for Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling to derive a tighter bound on the amount of interference of carry-in jobs at the expense of investigating a pseudo-polynomial number of intervals. This technique has been later adapted for Fixed-Priority (FP) scheduling to obtain the carry-in bound efficiently by examining only one interval, leading to a significant improvement in multi-core schedulability analysis. However, such a successful result has not yet been transferred to any other non-FP scheduling algorithms. Motivated by this, this paper presents a generic limited carry-in technique that is applicable to any work-conserving algorithms. Specifically, this paper derives a carry-in bound in an algorithm-independent manner and demonstrates how to apply the bound to existing non-FP schedulability analysis methods for better schedulability.     

实时事务调度及静态可调度性分析

在类似闭环控制的硬实时数据库应用环境,实时事务具有一定的静态可预报性,其中实时事务的可调度性分析是维护实时数据库时间正确性的基础.通过利用抢占阈值,提出了一种新的实时事务处理模型,它集成了CPU调度和数据调度,实现离线并发控制,具有单阻塞的特征与好的静态可预测性,并有利于降低事务系统的负载和改善可调度性.进一步由此建立了实时事务的静态可调度性分析模型以及求最优可行调度的整数规划模型,该模型有利于达到实时事务调度的整体优化.     

Schedulability analysis of fixed-priority systems using timed automata

In classic scheduling theory, real-time tasks are usually assumed to be periodic, i.e. tasks are released and computed with fixed rates periodically. To relax the stringent constraints on task arrival times, we propose to use timed automata to describe task arrival patterns. In a previous work, it is shown that the general schedulability checking problem for such models is a reachability problem for a decidable class of timed automata extended with subtraction. Unfortunately, the number of clocks needed in the analysis is proportional to the maximal number of schedulable task instances associated with a model, which is in many cases huge. In this paper, we show that for fixed-priority scheduling strategy, the schedulability checking problem can be solved using standard timed automata with two   extra clocks in addition to the clocks used in the original model to describe task arrival times. The analysis can be done in a similar manner to response time analysis in classic Rate-Monotonic Analysis (RMA). The result is further extended to systems with data-dependent control, in which the release time of a task may depend on the time-point at which other tasks finish their execution. For the case when the execution times of tasks are constants, we show that the schedulability problem can be solved using n+1$n+1$ extra clocks, where n$n$ is the number of tasks. The presented analysis techniques have been implemented in the Times tool. For systems with only periodic tasks, the performance of the tool is comparable with tools implementing the classic RMA technique based on equation-solving, without suffering from the exponential explosion in the number of tasks.     

The Non-Optimality of the Monotonic Priority Assignments for Hard Real-Time Offset Free Systems

In this paper, we study the problem of scheduling hard real-time periodic tasks with static priority pre-emptive algorithms. We consider tasks which are characterized by a period, a hard deadline, a computation time and an offset (the time of the first request), where the offsets may be chosen by the scheduling algorithm, hence the denomination offset free systems.We study the rate monotonic and the deadline monotonic priority assignments for this kind of system and we compare the offset free systems and the asynchronous systems in terms of priority assignment. Hence, we show that the rate and the deadline monotonic priority assignments are not optimal for offset free systems.     

改进的抢占阈值调度任务响应时间分析方法

现有的基于抢占阈值调度的任务响应时间分析方法对实时任务系统进行可调度性判定时，对任务响应时间估计过低，造成任务错过期限的现象。针对上述缺点不足，该文提出改进的基于抢占阈值调度的任务响应时间分析方法，考虑了任务释放抖动和时钟嘀嗒调度的影响，使用改进的任务参数计算系统任务时间需求函数。仿真对比结果表明，改进后的方法较单纯固定优先级抢占阈值调度下的任务响应时间分析方法得到更加精确可调度性分析结果。     

模糊动态抢占调度算法

针对不确定任务特征，提出应用模糊理论进行动态抢占调度，用语言模糊集来描述任务的不确定特征和不同的优先级等级，利用最大隶属度原理确定任务的优先级等级，采用优先调度高优先级等级任务的调度策略提高重要任务的调度成功率，实现具有不确定任务特征的抢占调度，与传统的EDF和LSF算法相比较，仿真表明，所提算法能够提高重要任务的调度成功率，并降低重要任务的截止期错失率；同时，任务间的平均切换次数大大小于LSF的平均切换次数，而与EDF保持相当，该方法可应用于计算机控制系统的控制任务调度，并借鉴于其它具有不确定任务特征或具有有限优先级等级的实时调度问题研究中。     

REDUCING CONTROL LATENCY AND JITTER IN REAL‐TIME CONTROL

This paper analyses control computation latency and jitter, which have been largely ignored in the control community for real‐time (RT) control. The focus is on RT control systems with multiple control tasks running on a uniprocessor. Three strategies are proposed to reduce control latency and/or jitter: introduction of offsets into control task scheduling, decomposition of control tasks; and increasing the priority levels of output subtasks. Examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.     

Improved Task and Resource Partitioning Under the Resource-Oriented Partitioned Scheduling

Coordinated partitioning and resource sharing have attracted considerable research interest in the field of real-time multiprocessor systems. However, finding an optimal partition is widely known as NP-hard, even for independent tasks. A recently proposed resource-oriented partitioned (ROP) fixed-priority scheduling that partitions tasks and shared resources respectively has been shown to achieve a non-trivial speedup factor guarantee, which promotes the research of coordinated scheduling to a new level. Despite the theoretical elegance, the schedulability performance of ROP scheduling is restricted by the heuristic partitioning methods used in the original study. In this paper, we address the partitioning problem for tasks and shared resources under the ROP scheduling. A unified schedulability analysis framework for the ROP scheduling is proposed in the first place. A sophisticated partitioning approach based on integer linear programming (ILP) is then proposed based on the unified analysis. Empirical results show that the proposed methods improve the schedulability of ROP scheduling significantly, and the runtime complexity for searching a solution is reduced prominently compared with other ILP-based approaches as well.

     

Feasibility Analysis of Real-Time Periodic Tasks with Offsets

The problem of feasibility analysis of asynchronous periodic task sets, where tasks can have an initial offset, is known to be co-NP-complete in the strong sense. A sufficient pseudo-polynomial test has been proposed by Baruah, Howell and Rosier, which consists in analyzing the feasibility of the corresponding synchronous task set (i.e. all offsets are set equal to 0). If the test gives a positive result, then the original asynchronous task set is feasible; else, no definitive answer can be given. In many cases, this sufficient test is too pessimistic, i.e. it gives no response for many feasible task sets.In this paper, we present a new sufficient pseudo-polynomial test for asynchronous periodic task sets. Our test reduces the pessimism by explicitely considering the offsets in deriving a small set of critical arrival patterns. We show, trough a set of extensive simulations, that our test outperforms the previous sufficient test.Rodolfo Pellizzoni received the Laurea degree in Computer Engineering from the Università di Pisa and the Diploma degree from the Scuola Superiore SantAnna, in 2004. He is presently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His main research interests are in real-time operating systems, scheduling theory and resource-allocation in distributed and multiprocessor systems.Giuseppe Lipari graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Pisa in 1996, and received the Ph.D. degree in Computer Engineering from Scuola Superiore SantAnna in 2000. During 1999, he was a visiting student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, collaborating with professor S.K. Baruah and professor K. Jeffay on real-time scheduling. Currently, he is assistant professor of Operating Systems with Scuola Superiore SantAnna. His main research activities are in real-time scheduling theory and its application to real-time operating systems, soft real-time systems for multimedia applications and component-based real-time systems.     

基于混合架构的嵌入式实时操作系统设计

在嵌入式实时操作系统中,单独使用合作式调度或抢占式调度难以同时完全满足时间触发任务和事件触发任务调度的性能要求。针对该问题,结合不同调度方式和触发方式的优点,设计一个基于混合架构的嵌入式实时操作系统SinewOS。该系统支持时间/事件触发、合作式/抢占式的混合调度以及同等优先级任务的调度。实验结果证明,该系统具有良好的可预测性和时间确定性,事件响应速度快,代码空间要求低,适用范围广。     

Analysis of window-constrained execution time systems

Feasibility tests for hard real-time systems provide information about the schedulability of the task set. However, this information is a yes or a no answer, that is, whether the task set achieves the test or not. From the real-time system design point of view, having more information available would be useful. For example, how much the computation time can vary without jeopardising the system feasibility. This work specifically provides methods to determine off-line how much a task can increase its computation time, by maintaining the system feasibility under a dynamic priority scheduling. The extra time can be determined not only in all the task activations, but in n of a window of m invocations. This is what we call a window-constrained execution time system. The results presented in this work can be used in all kinds of real-time systems: fault tolerance management, imprecise computation, overrun handling, control applications, etc. Patricia Balbastre is an assistant professor of Computer Engineering. She graduated in Electronic Engineering at the Technical University of Valencia, Spain, in 1998. And the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the same university in 2002. Her main research interests include real-time operating systems, dynamic scheduling algorithms and real-time control. Ismael Ripoll received the B.S. degree from the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, in 1992; the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, Spain, in 1996. Currently he is Professor in the DISCA Department of the same University. His research interests include embedded and real-time operating systems. Alfons Crespo is Professor of the Department of Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Valencia. He received the PhD in Computer Science from the Technical University of Valencia, Spain, in 1984. He held the position of Associate professor in 1986 and full Professor in 1991. He leads the group of Industrial Informatics and has been the responsible of several European and Spanish research projects. His main research interest include different aspects of the real-time systems (scheduling, hardware support, scheduling and control integration, …). He has published more than 60 papers in specialised journals and conferences in the area of real-time systems.     

开销敏感的多处理器最优节能实时调度算法

嵌入式多处理器系统的能耗问题变得日益重要,如何减少能耗同时满足实时约束成为多处理器系统节能实时调度中的一个重要问题.目前绝大多数研究基于关键速度降低处理器的频率以减少动态能耗,采用关闭处理器的方法减少静态能耗.虽然这种方法可以实现节能,但是不能保证最小化能耗.而现有最优的节能实时调度未考虑处理器状态切换的时间和能量开销,因此在切换开销不可忽视的实际平台中不再是最优的.文中针对具有独立动态电压频率调节和动态功耗管理功能的多处理器系统,考虑处理器切换开销,提出一种基于帧任务模型的最优节能实时调度算法.该算法根据关键速度来判断系统负载情况,确定具有最低能耗值的活跃处理器个数,然后根据状态切换开销来确定最优调度序列.该算法允许实时任务在处理器之间任意迁移,计算复杂度小,易于实现.数学分析证明了该算法的最优性.     

Dynamic priority ceilings: A concurrency control protocol for real-time systems

Real-time systems have stringent deadline requirements for their tasks. To meet the requirements, a real-time system must use scheduling algorithms that ensure a predictable response even in the face of mutually exclusive accesses to critical sections. We present a concurrency control protocol for systems using the earliest deadline first scheduling algorithm. The protocol specifies a dynamic priority ceiling for each critical section which is the earliest deadline of jobs which are currently in or will enter the critical section. Jobs trying to enter a critical section will be blocked if they do not have a priority higher than the priority ceiling of any critical section which is in use. We show that the protocol prevents both deadlock and chained blocking. The schedulability condition and implementation issues of the protocol are also discussed.     

Real-time task scheduling by multiobjective genetic algorithm

Real-time tasks are characterized by computational activities with timing constraints and classified into two categories: a hard real-time task and a soft real-time task. In hard real-time tasks, tardiness can be catastrophic. The goal of hard real-time tasks scheduling algorithms is to meet all tasks’ deadlines, in other words, to keep the feasibility of scheduling through admission control. However, in the case of soft real-time tasks, slight violation of deadlines is not so critical.In this paper, we propose a new scheduling algorithm for soft real-time tasks using multiobjective genetic algorithm (moGA) on multiprocessors system. It is assumed that tasks have precedence relations among them and are executed on homogeneous multiprocessor environment.The objective of the proposed scheduling algorithm is to minimize the total tardiness and total number of processors used. For these objectives, this paper combines adaptive weight approach (AWA) that utilizes some useful information from the current population to readjust weights for obtaining a search pressure toward a positive ideal point. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithm is shown through simulation studies.     

Dual ceiling protocol for real-time synchronization under preemption threshold scheduling

The application of object-oriented design methods to real-time embedded systems is seriously hindered by the lack of existing real-time scheduling techniques that can be seamlessly integrated into these methods. Preemption threshold scheduling (PTS) enables a scalable real-time system design and thus has been suggested as a solution to this problem. However, direct adoption of PTS may lead to long priority inversion since object-oriented real-time systems require synchronization considerations in order to maintain consistent object states. In this paper, we propose the dual ceiling protocol (DCP) in order to solve this problem. While DCP exploits both priority ceilings and preemption threshold ceilings, this is not a straightforward integration of existing real-time synchronization protocols for PTS. We present the rationale for the locking conditions of DCP and show that it leads to the least blocking and response times by comparison with other real-time synchronization protocols. We also present its blocking properties and schedulability analyses. We implemented PTS and DCP in a real-time object-oriented CASE tool and present the associated experimental results, which show that the proposed protocol is a viable solution that is superior to other real-time synchronization protocols for PTS.