SENSOR MEASUREMENT SCHEDULING - AN ENHANCED DYNAMIC, PREEMPTIVE ALGORITHM

An enhanced architecture for a sensor measurement scheduler and a dyna mic sensor scheduling algorithm called the on-line, greedy, urgency-dr iven, preemptive scheduling algorithm (OGUPSA) are presented. The prem ise is that the function of sensor management can be partitioned into the two tasks of information management, essentially an information to measurement mapping, and a sensor scheduler that takes the measuremen t requests along with their priorities and optimally maps them to a se t of sensors. OGUPSA was developed using the three main scheduling pol icies of most-urgent-first to pick a task, earliest-completed-first to select a sensor, and least-versatile-first to resolve ties. By succes sive application of these policies. OGUPSA dynamically allocates, sche dules, and distributes a set of measurement tasks from an information manager among a set of sensors. OGUPSA can detect the failure of a mea surement task to meet a deadline and improves the dynamic load balance among all sensors while being a polynomial time algorithm. One of the key components of OGUPSA is the information in the applicable sensor table. This table is the mechanism that is used to assign requested ta sks to specific sensors. (C) 1998 Society of Photo-Optical Instrumenta tion Engineers.