Scheduling distributed real-time tasks with minimum jitter

The problem of scheduling real-time tasks with minimum jitter is particular ly important in many control applications; nevertheless, it has rarely been studied in the scientific literature. This paper presents a unconventional scheduling approach for distributed static systems where tasks are periodi c and have arbitrary deadlines, precedence, and exclusion constraints. The solution presented in this work not only creates feasible schedules, but al so minimizes jitter for periodic tasks. We present a general framework cons isting of an abstract architecture model and a general programming model. W e show how to design a surprisingly simple and flexible scheduling method b ased on simulated annealing. Experimental results demonstrate the significa nt improvement of our algorithm over earliest deadline first and rate monot onic algorithms.