Adaptive and Flexible Scheduling Frameworks for Component-Based Real-Time Systems

Modern computer systems are often designed to play a multipurpose role. Therefore, they are capable of running a number of software components (software programs) simultaneously in parallel. These software components should share the system resources (e.g. processor and network) such that all of them run and finish their computations as expected. On the other hand, a number of software components have timing requirements meaning that they should not only access the resources, but this access should also be in a timely manner. Thus, there is a need to timely share the resources among different software components. The time-sharing is often realized by reserving a time-portion of resources for each component. Such a reservation should be sufficient and resource-efficient. It should be sufficient to preserve the timing properties of the components. Also, the reservations should be resource-efficient to reduce the components’ footprint on the resources which in turn allows integration of more software components on a given hardware resource. In this thesis, we mainly focus on the resource-efficiency of the reservations. We consider two cases. (I) Components which can tolerate occasional timing violations (soft real-time components): in this case we adjust the reservations during runtime to match the reservation sizes based on the instantaneous requirements of the components. (II) Components which cannot tolerate any timing violations (hard real-time components): in this case we use flexible approaches which allow us to improve the resource-efficiency at the design time.