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Combinatorial abstraction refinement for feasibility analysis of static priorities

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Abstract

Combinatorial explosion is a challenge for many analysis problems in the theory of hard real-time systems. One of these problems is static priority schedulability of workload models which are more expressive than the traditional periodic task model. Different classes of directed graphs have been proposed in recent years to model structures like frames, branching and loops. In contrast to dynamic priority schedulers with pseudo-polynomial time analysis methods, static priority schedulability has been shown to be intractable since it is strongly coNP-hard already for the relatively simple class of cyclic digraphs. The core of this problem is the necessity to combine different behaviors of the participating tasks.

We introduce a novel iterative approach to efficiently cope with this combinatorial explosion, called combinatorial abstraction refinement. In combination with other techniques it significantly reduces exponential growth of run-time for most inputs. We apply the method to static task priorities and demonstrate that a prototype implementation outperforms the state-of-the art pseudo-polynomial analysis for dynamic priority feasibility. It further shows better scaling behavior for randomly generated problem instances. We extend the approach to non-preemptive schedulers as well as static job-type priorities where jobs of different types in the same task may be assigned different static priorities. Finally, we provide a general, abstract formulation of the algorithm, since we believe that this method can be applicable to a variety of combinatorial problems in the theory of real-time systems with certain abstraction structures.

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Notes

  1. Another important condition for this is that all jobs released by the same task do have the same priority. We extend the method to SJP in Sect. 6, i.e., where different vertices could be assigned different static priorities.

  2. The point-wise maximum on request functions and the dominance relation from Definition 6 are a join-semilattice \((\succcurlyeq , \sqcup )\) on the request functions for each task. These semilattices are the core structure of our abstraction refinement technique.

  3. A bound \(L\) for the size of the maximal busy window can be easily computed by finding smallest interval size \(t\) for which \(\sum _{T\in \tau } \textit{mrf }^{(T)}(t) \leqslant t\).

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers of the RTSS 2013 conference and the Real-Time Systems journal for their constructive comments on the conference version (Stigge and Yi 2013) and earlier manuscripts of this article, respectively.

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  1. Department of Information Technology, Uppsala University, Box 337, 751 05, Uppsala, Sweden

    Martin Stigge & Wang Yi

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  1. Martin Stigge
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Correspondence to Martin Stigge.

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Stigge, M., Yi, W. Combinatorial abstraction refinement for feasibility analysis of static priorities. Real-Time Syst 51, 639–674 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11241-015-9220-5

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