A framework for scheduling real-time systems

Real-time system is playing an important role in our society. For such a system, sensitivity to timing is the central feature of system behaviors, which means tasks in the systems are required to be completed before their deadlines. To guarantee this requirement, the design of scheduling is crucial. In this paper, based on satisfiability modulo theories (SMT), we provide a framework to design scheduling for real-time systems. In the framework, the problem of scheduling is treated as a satisfiability problem. The key work is to formalize the satisfiability problem using first-order language. After the formalization, a SMT solver(e.g., Z3, Yices) is employed to solver such a satisfiability problem. An optimal schedule can be generated based on a solution model returned by the SMT solver. To demonstrate the practicality of the framework, we give design guidelines for real-time systems with multiprocessor. Through the demonstration, the framework is found flexible and sufficiently general to apply to different kinds of real-time systems. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first time that systematically introducing SMT to solve a series problems covering a wide range in real-time scheduling domain