Parallel Execution of I/O System and Application Functionality.
Leif Enblom · 2003
Many real-time control systems in industry are designed today for single processor architectures. At the same time, more functionality needs to be integrated into the software system. In order to enable correct timely execution of the control and protection applications, designers may need to optimize application code aggressively. Unwanted simplifications of algorithms or low sampling frequencies of the environment may be the result. Functionality in a system, which already has a degree of concurrency, may enable the system to scale onto a multiprocessor environment. This paper discusses and presents results from a study, which separates a substation automation real-time I/O communication system from application level threads in order to exploit existing concurrency. Within the system model described here, as well as in many other system models, it is possible to execute communication mechanisms and applications in parallel. The motivation for this work is let parallel execution of the I/O System and the application enable higher performance for application functionality. The result is more flexibility for the application designers. By describing a model of the real-time substation automation I/O System and extending that model with a mechanism to enable execution in a multiprocessor architecture, we contribute to the understanding of both the composition and the performance issues concerning parallel execution in such industrial systems. Measurements and results originate from execution in an existing system and from the multiprocessor system created.