Predictive Control for Performance Guarantees in Soft Real-Time Scheduling Systems

To provide performance guarantee for real-time scheduling applications working in open and unpredictable environments, a model predictive control approach is applied to regulate multiple performance metrics of soft real-time scheduling systems with uncertain task set characteristic. Utilization and deadline miss control of real-time scheduling is modeled as a multivariable optimization problem. A single input multi-output predictive control framework and algorithm is presented based on a standard quadratic programming solver and a difference equation model that describes soft real-time scheduling systems. The simulation results demonstrate that predictive control scheduling can regulate the utilization and the deadline miss of real-time scheduling systems and show robustness when the actual execution time of tasks deviate from design value at runtime.