Sensitivity Analysis of the Minimum Task Period for Arbitrary Deadline Real-Time Systems

The most important character of real-time systems is that they have stringent timing deadlines that must be guaranteed. A hard real-time system is required to complete its operations before all its timing deadlines. For a given task set, it is useful in an engineering context to know what changes to period can be made to a task that will deliver a schedulable system. In this paper, we develop the sensitivity analysis of task period for EDF scheduled systems on a uniprocessor. We prove that a minimum task period can be determined by a single pass of the QPA algorithm; an improved scheme is presented by using different initial values of the period. The approaches developed for sensitivity analysis of task period are therefore as efficient as QPA, and are easily incorporated into a system design support tool.