Optimal and fast composition of resource-sharing components in hierarchical real-time systems

In this paper we consider various flavors of the stack resource policy (SRP) for arbitrating access to shared resources in a hierarchical scheduling framework (HSF) upon a uni-processor. We propose algorithms for exploring and selecting the (local) resource ceilings within components, such that it results in an optimal composition of resource-sharing components in an HSF. Existing methods are non-optimal, because (i) they optimize just the length of global non-preemptive execution of tasks and (ii) they do not detect whether or not resources are shared globally (i.e., between tasks of different components). Lifting these limitations leads to an exponential growth of the design space. This paper contributes a fast three-step methodology which lifts these limitations, i.e., we apply the SRP at each level of the HSF to just the resources being shared. Our algorithm selects those component interfaces (i.e., by fixing the local resource ceilings of each component) that minimize the system load