Fault-tolerant and real-time scheduling for mixed-criticality systems

The design and analysis of real-time scheduling algorithms for safety-critical systems is a challenging problem due to the temporal dependencies among different design constraints. This paper considers scheduling sporadic tasks with three interrelated design constraints: (i) meeting the hard deadlines of application tasks, (ii) providing fault tolerance by executing backups, and (iii) respecting the criticality of each task to facilitate system’s certification. First, a new approach to model mixed-criticality systems from the perspective of fault tolerance is proposed. Second, a uniprocessor fixed-priority scheduling algorithm, called fault-tolerant mixed-criticality (FTMC) scheduling, is designed for the proposed model. The FTMC algorithm executes backups to recover from task errors caused by hardware or software faults. Third, a sufficient schedulability test is derived, when satisfied for a (mixed-criticality) task set, guarantees that all deadlines are met even if backups are executed to recover from errors. Finally, evaluations illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed test.