Hierarchical scheduling is an effective approach developed to support the integration of independently developed ap- plications on the same computing platform. In particular, the M-BROE framework has been recently proposed and an- alyzed to efflciently support component-based development on multiprocessor platforms through the virtual multipro- cessor abstraction implemented by reservation servers, in the presence of shared resources. However, the problems of partitioning applications to virtual processors and defining reservation parameters were not addressed. This paper fills this gap by proposing a design methodology as an optimization problem for partitioning applications to virtual processors, performing a synthesis of the component in...