This paper examines the problem of scheduling the mixed workload of both sporadic (on-line) and periodic (off-line) tasks on uniprocessor in a hard real-time environment. The authors introduce an optimal earliest deadline scheduling algorithm to optimize response time while ensuring that all periodic tasks meet their deadlines and to accept as many sporadic tasks. A necessary and sufficient schedulability test is presented, and an efficient O(n+m) guarantee algorithm is proposed. This optimal algorithm results in dynamic scheduling solutions. They are presented by a proposed intelligent agent-based architecture where a software agent is used to evaluate the response time, to calculate the processor utilization factor and also to verify the satisfaction of real-time deadlines. The agent dynamically provides technical solutions for users where the system becomes unfeasible by sending sporadic tasks to idle times, by modifying the deadlines of tasks, the worst case execution times (WCETs), the activation time, by tolerating some non critical tasks according to the (m, n) firm and a reasonable cost, or in the worst case by removing some non hard (soft) tasks according to predefined heuristic. The authors implement the agent to support these services which are applied to extensive experiments with real-life design examples in order to demonstrate the effectiveness and the excellent performance of the new optimal algorithm in normal and overload conditions.
Convex Partitions of Polyhedra: A Lower Bound and Worst-Case Optimal Algorithm
