Designing a Scheduling Tool for Distributed Real-Time Communication

The Modular Power Stress (MoPS) test system describes a system architecture that allows the operator to define and create stress tests and life tests in a very simple manner. The time-triggered extension of the communication system requires a real-time communication scheduling tool which allows an operator to generate real-time communication schedules using simple data dependency graphs. Different scheduling concepts where researched where one scheduling approach was developed and implemented as a prototype in the course of this Master thesis project. The problem statement was divided into three areas: The research of applicable scheduling algorithms, the elaboration, implementation and verification of a scheduling algorithm dealing with the bottleneck of a distributed communication system, and the implementation of an intuitive user interface via which the test description is defined. Based on this work, the configuration and verification of time-based test procedures is simplified. The developed scheduling tool allows to design the dependencies between tasks via a graphical user interface. Based on this description a real-time communication schedule is generated. To prevent communication issues by an erroneous schedule, the test description as well as the generated schedule are verified using various sanity-checks. These checks can also be executed via the command-line interface enabling external tools like the MoPS host software to verify the correctness of a communication schedule before it is loaded.