A structural approach to quasi-static schedulability analysis of communicating concurrent programs

We describe a system as a set of communicating concurrent programs. Quasi-static scheduling compiles the concurrent programs into a sequential one. It uses a Petri net as an intermediate model of the system. However, Petri nets generated from many interesting applications are not schedulable. In this paper, we show the underlying mechanism which causes unschedulability in terms of the structure of a Petri net. We introduce a Petri net structural property and prove unschedulability if the property holds. We propose a linear programming based algorithm to check the property, and prove the algorithm is valid. Our approach prove unschedulability typically within a second for Petri nets generated from industrial JPEG and MPEG codecs, while the scheduler fails to terminate within 24 hours.