Novel scheduling policies in real-time multithread control system design

In this paper soft real-time scheduling approaches (Resource Reservations) are applied to multithread digital control design and implementation. The advantage of this choice is the possibility of raising the sampling frequencies beyond the hard real-time boundaries, while retaining control on the transient overloads. An important component of the proposed framework is a simulation tool, which allows for a fine tuning of the scheduling parameters. Experimental and simulation results on two case studies show a significant performance improvement with respect to hard real-time scheduling, especially when the feedback controller operates on dataflows requiring statistically widespread computation times. © 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.