Supervisory control for fault-tolerant scheduling of real-time multiprocessor systems with aperiodic tasks

Abstract

Supervisory control theory is a well-established theoretical framework for feedback control of discrete event systems whose behaviours are described by automata and formal languages. In this article, we propose a formal constructive method for optimal fault-tolerant scheduling of real-time multiprocessor systems based on supervisory control theory. In particular, we consider a fault-tolerant and schedulable language which is an achievable set of event sequences meeting given deadlines of accepted aperiodic tasks in the presence of processor faults. Such a language eventually provides information on whether a scheduler (i.e., supervisor) should accept or reject a newly arrived aperiodic task. Moreover, we present a systematic way of computing a largest fault-tolerant and schedulable language which is optimal in that it contains all achievable deadline-meeting sequences.