Schedulability-oriented replication of periodic tasks in distributed real-time systems

We consider the schedulability-oriented replication problem of a set of periodic real-time tasks where each task can be decomposed into several modules and intermodule communications. The objective is to find an allocation in which there exists a feasible schedule for the given task set. In this paper, we adopt a communication model where the replication of modules is not for the sake of fault tolerance but for increasing the degree of schedulability. To solve the problem, we develop a replication technique and embed the technique in a simulated annealing algorithm. Experimental results show that such replication may lead to a higher degree of schedulability and obtain a feasible solution.