Flexibility Driven Scheduling and Mapping for Distributed Real-Time Systems

In this paper we present an approach to mapping and scheduling of distributed hard real-time systems, aiming at improving the flexibility of the design process. We consider an incremental design process that starts from an already existing system running a set of applications, with preemptive priority based scheduling at the process level, and time triggered static scheduling at the communication level. We are interested to implement new functionality so that the already running applications are disturbed as little as possible and there is a good chance that, later, new functionality can easily be added to the resulted system. The mapping and scheduling problems are considered in the context of a realistic communication model based on a TDMA protocol. Extensive experiments as well as a real life example demonstrate the relevance of this problem and the efficiency of our solutions.