Refinement of Workload Models for Engine Controllers by State Space Partitioning

We study an engine control application where the behavior of engine controllers depends on the engine’s rotational speed. For efficient and precise timing analysis, we use the Digraph Real-Time (DRT) task model to specify the workload of control tasks where we employ optimal control theory to faithfully calculate the respective minimum inter-release times. We show how DRT models can be refined by finer grained partitioning of the state space of the engine up to a model which enables an exact timing analysis. Compared to previously proposed methods which are either unsafe or pessimistic, our work provides both abstract and tight characterizations of the corresponding workload. 1998 ACM Subject Classification C.3 Real-Time and Embedded Systems