Efficiently Handling Process Overruns and Underruns in Real-Time Embedded Systems

Methods for handling process underruns and overruns when scheduling a set of real-time processes increase both system utilization and robustness in the presence of inaccurate estimates of the worst-case computations of real-time processes. In this paper, we present a method that efficiently re-computes latest start times for real time processes during run-time in the event that a real-time process is preempted or has completed (or overrun). The method effectively identifies which process latest start times will be affected by the preemption or completion of a process. Hence the method is able to effectively reduce real-time system overhead by selectively re-computing latest start times for the specific processes whose latest start times are changed by a process preemption or completion, as opposed to indiscriminately re-computing latest start times for all the processes.