A guidance framework for synthesis of multi-core reconfigurable real-time systems

Nowadays, multi-core architectures are being more and more used in the design of real-time systems. Those systems react usually to their environment that requires to amend their behaviors by applying reconfiguration scenarios. This paper deals with multi-core reconfigurable real-time systems that should be adapted to their environment under real-time constraints. Meanwhile, their synthesis induces a heavy system code and time overhead due to a huge number of threads. The setting up of those systems involves many stages: i) definition of system functionalities, ii) generating of tasks, iii) placement and scheduling of tasks, and iv) generating system code. Correct transition among these steps has an impact on the final system implementation. Thus the need of a designer's experience is definitely required. However, many problems related to design decisions can be caused due to the complexity of real-time analysis, scheduling, and placement. Those problems may conduct to infeasible implementations. The proposed approach presents a guidance framework to avoid these problems from specification to code generation. This framework is performed by mixed-integer linear programming. It aims to resolve a task partitioning/scheduling problem while optimizing some metrics. The viability of the proposed framework is illustrated by a case study and performance evaluation.