Minimizing a real-time task set through Task Clustering

Abstract

In the industry, real-time systems are specified as a set of hundreds of functionalities with timing constraints. Implementing those functionalities as threads in a one-to-one relation is not realistic due to the overhead caused by the large number of threads. In this paper, we present task clustering, which aims at minimizing the number of threads while preserving the schedulability. We prove that our clustering problem is NP-Hard and describe a heuristic to tackle it. Our approach has been applied to fixed-task or fixed-job priority based scheduling policies as Deadline Monotonic (DM) or Earliest Deadline First (EDF).