Scheduling distributed real-time tasks with minimum jitter

The problem of scheduling real-time tasks with minimum jitter is particularly important in many control applications; nevertheless, it has rarely been studied in the scientific literature. This paper presents an unconventional scheduling approach for distributed static systems where tasks are periodic and have arbitrary deadlines, precedence, and exclusion constraints. The solution presented in this work not only creates feasible schedules, but also minimizes jitter for periodic tasks. We present a general framework consisting of an abstract architecture model and a general programming model. We show how to design a surprisingly simple and flexible scheduling method based on simulated annealing. Experimental results demonstrate the significant improvement of our algorithm over earliest deadline first and rate monotonic algorithms.