Applicability of simulated annealing methods to real-time scheduling and jitter control

This paper presents a non-conventional scheduling approach for distributed static systems where tasks are periodic and have arbitrary deadlines, precedence, and exclusion constraints. The solution presented in this work not only creates feasible schedules, but also minimizes jitter for periodic tasks. The problem of scheduling real-time tasks with minimum jitter is particularly important in many control applications, nevertheless, it has been rarely studied in the scientific literature. We present a general framework consisting of an abstract architecture model and a general programming model. We show how to design a surprisingly simple and flexible scheduling method based on simulated annealing and present some experimental results.