Optimizing Expected Time Utility in Cyber-Physical Systems Schedulers
Terry Tidwell, Robert Glaubius, Christopher D. Gill, William D. Smart · 2010
Abstract—Classical scheduling abstractions such as deadlines and priorities do not readily capture the complex timing semantics found in many real-time cyber-physical systems. Time utility functions provide a necessarily richer description of timing semantics, but designing utility-aware scheduling policies using them is an open research problem. In particular, scheduling design that optimizes expected utility accrual is needed for realtime cyber-physical domains. In this paper we design scheduling policies that optimize expected utility accrual for cyber-physical systems with periodic, non-preemptable tasks that run with stochastic duration. These policies are derived by solving a Markov Decision Process formulation of the scheduling problem. We use this formulation to demonstrate that our technique improves on existing heuristic utility accrual scheduling policies. I.