Wen-Hung Huang and Jian-Jia Chen (B2 SFB project) received the Best Paper Award of IEEE Real-Time Computing Systems and Applications. (RTCSA) Aug 19, 2015 - Aug 21, 2015, Hong Kong. The awarded paper is "Techniques for Schedulability Analysis in Mode Change Systems under Fixed-Priority Scheduling”. The paper explores a very essential scheduling property in cyber-physical systems when the execution time, relative deadline, and period of sampling can change over time according to different physical conditions. We conclude a 58.57% utilization bound for a very dynamic environment under mode-level fixed-priority scheduling. 

Abstract: With the advent of cyber-physical systems, realtime tasks shall be run in different modes over time to react to the change of the physical environment. It is preferable to adopt high expressive models in real-time systems. In the light of simple implementation in kernels, fixed-priority scheduling has been widely adopted in commercial real-time systems. In this work we derive a technique for analyzing schedulability of the system where tasks can undergo mode change under fixed-priority scheduling. We study two types of fixed-priority scheduling in mode change systems: task-level and mode-level fixed-priority scheduling. The proposed tests run in polynomial time. We further show that a utilization of 58.57% can be guaranteed in implicit-deadline multi-mode systems if each mode is prioritized according to rate-monotonic policy. The effectiveness of the proposed tests is also shown via extensive simulation results.