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Measuring the Performance of Schedulability Tests

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Abstract

The high computational complexity required for performing an exact schedulability analysis of fixed priority systems has led the research community to investigate new feasibility tests which are less complex than exact tests, but still provide a reasonable performance in terms of acceptance ratio. The performance of a test is typically evaluated by generating a huge number of synthetic task sets and then computing the fraction of those that pass the test with respect to the total number of feasible ones. The resulting ratio, however, depends on the metrics used for evaluating the performance and on the method for generating random task parameters. In particular, an important factor that affects the overall result of the simulation is the probability density function of the random variables used to generate the task set parameters. In this paper we discuss and compare three different metrics that can be used for evaluating the performance of schedulability tests. Then, we investigate how the random generation procedure can bias the simulation results of some specific scheduling algorithm. Finally, we present an efficient method for generating task sets with uniform distribution in a given space, and show how some intuitive solutions typically used for task set generation can bias the simulation results.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Scuola Superiore S. Anna, Pisa, Italy

    Enrico Bini

  2. University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy

    Giorgio C. Buttazzo

Authors
  1. Enrico Bini
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  2. Giorgio C. Buttazzo
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Correspondence to Enrico Bini.

Additional information

This work has been partially supported by the European Union, under contract IST-004527, and by the Italian Ministry of University Research (MIUR), under contract 2003094275.

Enrico Bini received the Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna in Pisa, in October 2004. In 2000 he received the Laurea degree in Computer Engineering from “Università di Pisa” and, one year later, he obtained the “Diploma di Licenza” from the Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna. In 1999 he studied at Technische Universiteit Delft, in the Nederlands, by the Erasmus student exchange program. In 2001 he worked at Ericsson Lab Italy in Roma. In 2003 he was a visiting student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, collaborating with prof. Sanjoy Baruah. His research interests cover scheduling algorithms, real-time operating systems, embedded systems design and linear programming.

Giorgio Buttazzo is an Associate Professor of Computer Engineering at the University of Pavia, Italy. He graduated in Electronic Engineering at the University of Pisa in 1985, received a Master in Computer Science at the University of Pennsylvania in 1987, and a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering at the Scuola Superiore S. Anna of Pisa in 1991. During 1987, he worked on active perception and real-time control at the G.R.A.S.P.

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Bini, E., Buttazzo, G.C. Measuring the Performance of Schedulability Tests. Real-Time Syst 30, 129–154 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-005-0507-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-005-0507-9

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