Abstract
Over the past decades several approaches for schedu- lability analysis have been proposed for both uniprocessor and multi-processor real-time systems. Although different techniques are employed, very little has been put forward in using formal specifications, with the consequent possibility for misinterpretations or ambiguities in the problem statement. Using a logic based approach to schedulability analysis in the design of hard real-time systems eases the synthesis of correct-by- construction procedures for both static and dynamic verification processes. In this paper we propose a novel approach to schedulability analysis based on a timed temporal logic with time durations. Our approach subsumes classical methods for uniprocessor scheduling analysis over compositional resource models by providing the developer with counter-examples, and by ruling out schedules that cause unsafe violations on the system. We also provide an example showing the effectiveness of our proposal.

Abstract
Recent embedded processor architectures containing multiple heterogeneous cores and non-coherent caches renewed attention to the use of Software Transactional Memory (STM) as a building block for developing parallel applications. STM promises to ease concurrent and parallel software development, but relies on the possibility of abort conflicting transactions to maintain data consistency, which in turns affects the execution time of tasks carrying transactions. Because of this fact the timing behaviour of the task set may not be predictable, thus it is crucial to limit the execution time overheads resulting from aborts. In this paper we formalise a FIFO-based algorithm to order the sequence of commits of concurrent transactions. Then, we propose and evaluate two non-preemptive and one SRP-based fully-preemptive scheduling strategies, in order to avoid transaction starvation.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
The IEC 61499 standard proposes an event driven execution model for distributed control applications for which an informal execution semantics is provided. Consequently, run-time implementations are not rigorously described and therefore their behavior relies on the interpretation made by the tool provider. In this paper, as a step towards a formal semantics, we focus on the Execution Control Chart semantics, which is fundamental to the dynamic behavior of Basic Function Block elements. In particular we develop a well-formedness criterion that ensures a finite number of Execution Control Chart transitions for each triggering event. We also describe the first step towards the mechanization of the well-formedness checking algorithm in the Coq proof-assistant so that, ultimately, we are able to show, once and for all, that this algorithm is effectively correct with respect to our proposed execution semantics. The algorithm is extractable from the mechanization in a correct-by-construction way, and can be directly incorporated in certified toolchain for analysis, compilation and execution of IEC 61499 models. As a proof of concept a prototype tool RTFM-4FUN has been developed. It performs well-formedness checks on Basic Function Blocks using the extracted algorithm's code.

Abstract
This paper explores the behavior of parallel forkjoin tasks on multicore platforms by resorting to a semi-partitioned scheduling model. This model offers a promising framework to embedded systems which are subject to stringent timing constraints as it provides these systems with very interesting properties. The proposed approach consists of two stages-an offline stage and an online stage. During the offline stage, a multi-frame task model is adopted to perform the forkjoin task-to-core mapping so as to improve the schedulability and the performance of the system, and during the online stage, work-stealing is exploited among cores to improve the system responsiveness as well as to balance the execution workload. The objective of this work is twofold: (1) to provide an alternative technique that takes advantage of the semi-partitioned scheduling properties by offering the possibility to accommodate forkjoin tasks that cannot be scheduled in any pure partitioned environment, and (2) to reduce the migration overhead which has shown to be a traditional major source of non-determinism in global approaches. The simulation results show an improvement of the proposed approach over the state-of-the-art of up to 15% of the average response-time per task set.