D-scheduler: A scheduler in time-triggered distributed system through decoupling dependencies between tasks and messages

Time-triggered architecture, as a mainstream design of the distributed real-time system, has been successfully applied in the aerospace, automotive and mechanical industries. However, time-triggered scheduling is a challenging NP-hard problem. There are few studies that could quickly solve the scheduling problem of large distributed time-triggered systems. To solve this problem, a communication affinity parameter is defined in this paper to describe the degree of bias of the shaper task towards sending or receiving messages. Based on this, an innovative task-message decoupling model named D-scheduler is built to reduce the computation complexity of the scheduling problem in large-scale systems. Additionally, we provide mathematical proof that our model is a convex optimization that is easy to solve with existing computational tools. Our experiments substantiate the efficacy of the D-scheduler. It dramatically reduces the scheduling complexity of large-scale real-time systems with a small loss of solving space compared to the federal scheduler.