Improvement of Real-Time Job Completion Using Residual Time-Based (RTB) Scheduling

AbstractRealtime multi-process scheduling is commonly used in many control situations, where it is important to achieve job completions within specific time intervals. This paper investigates the potential improvement that might be achieved when additional information (notably the residual computing time of each process) is used in the scheduling process. First, a simulation study was completed in order to demonstrate the potential benefit of the approach. The results, over many alternative job processing time distributions, clearly show a significant benefit. Second, by using a discrete distribution as a representation/approximation of each job’s distribution, a technique is developed to achieve similar beneficial results using a practical, and time cost efficient scheduler. The discrete distributions can be derived from the computation structures for each process. The results show that the approach can be effective in real time scheduling situations.