Novel Scheduling Policies in Real-Time Multi-Thread Control System Design

In this paper a soft real-time approach, in particular, the Resource Reservation scheduling is applied to multi-thread digital control design and implementation. The advantage of this choice is the possibility of raising the sampling frequencies beyond the hard real-time boundaries in case of limited computational resources. A specialized control software simulator has been implemented and it allows a fine tuning of the additional scheduling parameters. Experimental and simulation results showed that soft real-time scheduling leads to a significant performance improvement with respect to hard real-time scheduling, especially when the feedback controller operates on multiple dataflows requiring statistically widespread computation times.