A design fix to supervisory control for fault-tolerant scheduling of real-time multiprocessor systems with aperiodic tasks

Abstract

In the article ‘Supervisory control for fault-tolerant scheduling of real-time multiprocessor systems with aperiodic tasks’, Park and Cho presented a systematic way of computing a largest fault-tolerant and schedulable language that provides information on whether the scheduler (i.e., supervisor) should accept or reject a newly arrived aperiodic task. The computation of such a language is mainly dependent on the task execution model presented in their paper. However, the task execution model is unable to capture the situation when the fault of a processor occurs even before the task has arrived. Consequently, a task execution model that does not capture this fact may possibly be assigned for execution on a faulty processor. This problem has been illustrated with an appropriate example. Then, the task execution model of Park and Cho has been modified to strengthen the requirement that none of the tasks are assigned for execution on a faulty processor.

Keywords:

• design fix
• supervisory control
• discrete event systems
• fault-tolerant scheduling
• multiprocessors
• real-time systems

Acknowledgements

The first author of this paper (R. Devaraj) is supported by Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), India, through TCS Research Fellowship Program.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.