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Fault-tolerant and real-time scheduling for mixed-criticality systems

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Abstract

The design and analysis of real-time scheduling algorithms for safety-critical systems is a challenging problem due to the temporal dependencies among different design constraints. This paper considers scheduling sporadic tasks with three interrelated design constraints: (i) meeting the hard deadlines of application tasks, (ii) providing fault tolerance by executing backups, and (iii) respecting the criticality of each task to facilitate system’s certification. First, a new approach to model mixed-criticality systems from the perspective of fault tolerance is proposed. Second, a uniprocessor fixed-priority scheduling algorithm, called fault-tolerant mixed-criticality (FTMC) scheduling, is designed for the proposed model. The FTMC algorithm executes backups to recover from task errors caused by hardware or software faults. Third, a sufficient schedulability test is derived, when satisfied for a (mixed-criticality) task set, guarantees that all deadlines are met even if backups are executed to recover from errors. Finally, evaluations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed test.

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Notes

  1. An interval is called level-i busy period if task \(\tau _i\) and its higher priority jobs continuously execute in that interval. A more formal definition of busy period will be provided later.

  2. A task is runnable if it has been released but has not completed its execution.

  3. The term “task errors” here refers to errors in the primary and backups of one job of task \(\tau _{i} \), i.e., errors are considered to be detected at the job level; not at task level.

  4. If the relative deadline of each task in a task set is less than or equal to its period, then the task set is called a constrained-deadline task system. If the relative deadline of each task is exactly equal to its period, then the task set is called an implicit-deadline task system.

  5. The \(h{th}\) job of task \(\tau _{k} \) is denoted by \(J_k^h\).

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  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, 412-96 , Göteborg, Sweden

    Risat Mahmud Pathan

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Pathan, R.M. Fault-tolerant and real-time scheduling for mixed-criticality systems. Real-Time Syst 50, 509–547 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-014-9202-z

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