Techniques and Analysis for Mixed-criticality Scheduling with Mode-dependent Server Execution Budgets

This article appears as part of the ESWEEK-TECS special issue and was presented at the International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT) 2019.In mixed-criticality systems, tasks of different criticality share system resources, mainly to reduce cost. Cost is further reduced by using adaptive mode-based scheduling arrangements, such as Vestal’s model, to improve resource efficiency, while guaranteeing schedulability of critical functionality. To simplify safety certification, servers are often used to provide temporal isolation between tasks. In its simplest form, a server is a periodically recurring time window, in which some tasks are scheduled. A server’s computational requirements may greatly vary in different modes, although state-of-the-art techniques and schedulability tests do not allow different budgets to be used by a server in different modes. This results in a single conservative execution budget for all modes, increasing system cost. The goal of this paper is to reduce the cost of mixed-criticality systems through three main contributions: (i) a scheduling arrangement for uniprocessor systems employing fixed-priority scheduling within periodic servers, whose budgets are dynamically adjusted at run-time in the event of a mode change, (ii) a new schedulability analysis for such systems, and (iii) heuristic algorithms for assigning budgets to servers in different modes and ordering the execution of the servers. Experiments with synthetic task sets demonstrate considerable improvements (up to 52.8%) in