The rapid development in information and communication technology confronts designers of real-time systems with new challenges that have arisen due to the increasing amount of data and an intensified interconnection of functions. This is e.g. driven by recent trends such as automated driving in the automotive field and digitization in factory automation. For distributed safety-critical systems, this progression has the impact that the complexity of scheduling tasks with precedence constraints organized in so-called task chains increases the more data has to be exchanged between tasks and the more functions are involved. Especially when data has to be transmitted over an Ethernet-based communication network, the coordination between the processing tasks running on different end-devices and the communication network has to be ensured to meet strict end-to-end deadlines of task chains. In this work, we present a heuristic approach that computes schedules for distributed and data-dependent task chains consisting of preemptive and periodic tasks, taking into account the network communication delays of time-sensitive networks. Our algorithm is able to solve large problems for synthetic network topologies with randomized data dependencies in a few seconds. A high success rate was achieved, which can also be further enhanced by relaxing the deadline conditions.
Detailed visualization of communication network topologies
