An Open-Source Flexible Scheduling Simulator for Real-Time Applications

There are several scheduling simulators to verify the behavior of real-time applications under different task scheduling algorithms. Current simulators cannot model the application accurately, and consequently the result of the simulation differs considerably from the actual behavior on a real computing system. This paper presents a scheduling simulator with application modeling capabilities for real-time applications. The proposed approach supports modeling of complex task control flows and dependency relations between tasks. In order to evaluate the modeling capabilities, we modeled a real engine control application and simulated it. We measured the response times of the application model running on our scheduling simulator and compared them with the ones obtained by running the real engine application binaries on an instruction set simulator. The average percentage errors in mean and worst-case response time between both simulations were only 9.6% and 8.6% respectively.