Assignment and pre-run-time scheduling of object-based, parallel real-time processes

Abstract The use of object-based programming techniques helps to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance, due to the benefits of reuse, information hiding and encapsulation. This is especially helpful in complex, real-time systems that are highly parallel and distributed, due to their magnitude. The paper presents a semi-preemption execution model of object-based real-time systems that simplifies reasoning about the quality of particular process-to-processor assignments. The model is used to define system properties such as inter-process parallelism, processor utilization and inter-processor communication. Additionally, we present an innovative assignment algorithm that incorporates feasibility constraints, and is guided by an objective that balances minimum communication against maximum parallelism. This work is part of a complete assignment and pre-run-time scheduling approach for distributed real-time systems