FT-Feasibility in Fixed Priority Real-Time Scheduling

Real-time systems typically have to satisfy complex requirements mapped to the timing attributes of the tasks that are eventually guaranteed by the underlying scheduler. These systems consist of a mix of hard and soft tasks with varying criticalities as well as associated fault tolerance (FT) requirements. Often time redundancy techniques are preferred in many embedded applications and hence it is extremely important to devise appropriate methodologies for scheduling real-time tasks under fault assumptions. Additionally, the relative criticality of tasks could undergo changes during the evolution of the system. Hence scheduling decisions under fault assumptions have to reflect all these important factors in addition to the resource constraints. In this paper we propose a framework for ’FTfeasibility’, i.e., to provide a priori guarantees that all critical tasks in the system will meet their deadlines even in case of faults. Our main objective here is to ensure FTfeasibility of all critical tasks in the system and do so with minimal costs and without any fundamental changes in the scheduling paradigm. We demonstrate its applicability in scenarios where the FT strategy employed is re-execution of the affected tasks or an alternate action upon occurrence of transient faults or software design faults. We analyse a feasible set of tasks and propose methods to adapt it to varying FT requirements without modifications to the underlying scheduler. We do so by reassigning task attributes to achieve FT-feasibility while keeping the costs minimised.