Optimizing Inter-Core Data-Propagation Delays in Industrial Embedded Systems under Partitioned Scheduling

This paper addresses the scheduling of industrial time-critical applications on multi-core embedded systems. A novel scheduling technique under partitioned scheduling is proposed that minimizes inter-core data-propagation delays between tasks that are activated with different periods. The proposed technique is based on the read-execute-write model for the execution of tasks to guarantee temporal isolation when accessing the shared resources. A Constraint Programming formulation is presented to find the schedule for each core. Evaluations are preformed to assess the scalability as well as the resulting schedulability ratio, which is still 18% for two cores that are both utilized 90%. Furthermore, an automotive industrial case study is performed to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed technique to industrial systems. The case study also presents a comparative evaluation of the schedules generated by (i) the proposed technique and (ii) the Rubus-ICE industrial tool suite with respect to jitter, inter-core data-propagation delays and their impact on data age of task chains that span multiple cores.