SLACK SCHEDULING FOR IMPROVED RESPONSE TIMES OF PERIOD TRANSFORMED PROCESSES

A method for scheduling periodic incremental and design to time processes. The algorithm is based on the slack stealer which dynamically determines the remaining slack time after all periodic processes are scheduled utilizing Rate Monotonic Scheduling (RMS). An incremental process determines how much execution time is available after the baseline component has completed and prior to the execution of a process increment. A design to time process determines how much execution time is available before the process begins execution and selects a version which gives the greatest precision in the available time. For both incremental and design to time processes, a minimum amount of time is statically reserved so that an acceptable but suboptimal solution will always be calculated. The solution identifies and proposes solutions for the practical problem of supporting criticalities when scheduling slack and analyzing the run-time overheads.