Response-Time Analysis of Multipath Flows in Hierarchically-Scheduled Time-Partitioned Distributed Real-Time Systems

Abstract

Modern industrial cyberphisical systems exhibit increasingly complex execution patterns like multipath end-to-end flows, that force the real-time community to extend the schedulability analysis methods to include these patterns. Only then it is possible to ensure that applications meet their deadlines even in the worst-case scenario. As a driving motivation, we present a real industrial application with safety requirements, that needs to be re-factored in order to leverage the features of new execution paradigms such as time partitioning. In this context we develop a new response-time analysis technique that provides the capacity of obtaining the worst-case response time of multipath flows in time-partitioned hierarchical schedulers and also in general fixed-priority (FP) real-time systems. We show that the results obtained with the new analysis reduce the pessimism of the currently used holistic analysis approach.