Guaranteeing Timely Response to Changes of Monitored Objects by Assigning Deadlines and Periods to Tasks

Timely response to changes of monitored objects is the key to ensuring the safety and reliability of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). There are two kinds of tasks in CPSs: update tasks and control tasks. Update tasks are responsible for updating the data in the system based on the state of the objects they monitor. Control tasks are responsible for making decisions based on the data in the system. The response time of the system to the change of a monitored object consists of two parts: the time taken by update tasks to reflect the change to the system, and the time taken by control tasks to make decisions according to the data in the system. Deadlines and periods of update tasks and control tasks directly affect the response time. Reasonable deadline and period assignment is the key to ensuring timely response to the changes of monitored objects. In this paper, we study the deadline and period assignment in CPSs. To the best of our knowledge, all existing work only focuses on the deadline and period assignment for update tasks with the goal of ensuring the freshness of the data in CPSs, and this is the first study focusing on the deadline and period assignment for both update tasks and control tasks with the goal of ensuring timely response to the changes of monitored objects. A new problem about response time control and system workload control is defined in this paper. Two deadline and period assignment methods are proposed to solve the defined problem. All the proposed methods can be used in the CPSs adopting the earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling method. Experiments with randomly generated tasks are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed methods in terms of acceptance ratio and execution efficiency.