Reconfiguration of Synchronous Real-Time Operating System

Real-time scheduling is the theoretical basis of real-time systems engineering. Earliest Deadline first (EDF) is an optimal scheduling algorithm for uniprocessor real-time systems. The paper deals with Reconfigurable Uniprocessor embedded Real-Time Systems classically implemented by different OS tasks that the authors suppose independent, synchronous and periodic to meet functional and temporal properties described in user requirements. They define two forms of automatic reconfigurations which are applied at run-time: Addition-Remove of tasks or just modifications of their temporal parameters: WCET and/or Periods. The authors define a new semantic of the reconfiguration where a crucial criterion to consider is the automatic improvement of the system’s feasibility at run-time by using an Intelligent Agent that automatically checks the system’s feasibility after any reconfiguration scenario to verify if all tasks meet the required deadlines. To handle all possible reconfiguration solutions, the authors propose an agent-based architecture that applies automatic reconfigurations to re-obtain the system’s feasibility and satisfy user requirements. Therefore, they developed the tool RT-Reconfiguration to support these contributions that they apply on the running example system and the authors apply the Real-Time Simulator, Cheddar to check the whole system behavior and evaluate the performance of the algorithm. They present simulations of this architecture where the agent that implemented is evaluated.