Real-time scheduling under uncertainty: Challenges and solutions

After a brief summary of the literature on real-time scheduling and scheduling analysis for hard real-time systems, I will present the challenges posed by modern architectures and modern applications. In particular, the use of sophisticated COTS processor leads to unpredictable execution times of concurrent tasks. Therefore, critical real-time systems must cope with uncertainty. Modern real-time systems must be design with robustness adaptivitv in mind: they must be able to detect anomalies in the temporal behaviour and react accordingly. I will highlight some of the techniques that can be used to alleviate the problem: from timing isolation of components, to soft-real-time scheduling techniques, to fault-tolerant techniques.