Weakly hard schedulability analysis for fixed priority scheduling of periodic real-time tasks

The hard deadline model is very popular in real-time research, but is representative or applicable to a small number of systems. Many applications, including control systems, are capable of tolerating occasional deadline misses, but are seriously compromised by a repeating pattern of late terminations. The weakly hard real-time model tries to capture these requirements by analyzing the conditions that guarantee that a maximum number of deadlines can be possibly missed in any set of consecutive activations. We provide a new weakly hard schedulability analysis method that applies to constrained-deadline periodic real-time systems scheduled with fixed priority and without knowledge of the task activation offsets. The analysis is based on a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) problem formulation; it is very general and can be adapted to include the consideration of resource sharing and activation jitter. A set of experiments conducted on an automotive engine control application and randomly generated tasksets show the applicability and accuracy of the proposed technique.