Many safety-critical real-time systems are considered certified when they meet failure probability requirements with respect to the maximum permitted incidences of failure per hour. In this article, the mixed-criticality task model with multiple worst case execution time (WCET) estimations is extended to incorporate such system-level certification restrictions. A new parameter is added to each task, characterizing the distribution of WCET estimations—the likelihood of all jobs of a task finishing their executions within the less pessimistic WCET estimates. Efficient algorithms are derived for scheduling mixed-criticality systems represented using this model for both uniprocessor and multiprocessor platforms for independent tasks. Furthermore, a 0/1 covariance matrix is introduced to represent the failure dependency between tasks. An efficient algorithm is proposed to schedule such failure-dependent tasks. Experimental analyses show our new model and algorithm outperform current state-of-the-art mixed-criticality scheduling algorithms.

Mixed-criticality (MC) scheduling of sequential tasks (with no intra-task parallelism) has been well-explored by the real-time systems community. However, till date, there has been little progress on MC scheduling of parallel tasks. MC scheduling of parallel tasks is highly challenging due to the requirement of various assurances under different criticality levels. In this work, we address the MC scheduling of parallel tasks of gang model that allows workloads to execute on multiple cores simultaneously. Such a workload model represents an efficient mode-based parallel processing scheme with many potential applications. To schedule such task sets, we propose a new technique GEDF-VD, which integrates Global Earliest Deadline First (GEDF) and Earliest Deadline First with Virtual Deadline (EDF-VD). We prove the correctness of GEDF-VD and provide a detailed quantitative evaluation in terms of speedup bound in both the MC and the non-MC cases. Specifically, we show that GEDF provides a speedup bound of 2 for non-MC gang tasks, while the speedup for GEDF-VD considering MC gang tasks is √5 + 1. Experiments on randomly generated gang task sets are conducted to validate our theoretical findings and to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

The scheduling of mixed-criticality (MC) systems with graceful degradation is considered, where LO-criticality tasks are guaranteed some service in HI mode in the form of minimum cumulative completion rates. First, we present an easy to implement admission-control procedure to determine which LO-criticality jobs to complete in HI mode. Then, we propose a demand-bound-function-based MC schedulability test that runs in pseudo-polynomial time for such systems under EDF-VD scheduling, wherein two virtual deadline setting heuristics are considered. Furthermore, we discuss a mechanism for the system to switch back from HI to LO mode and quantify the maximum time duration such recovery process would take. Finally, we show the effectiveness of our proposed method by experimental evaluation in comparison to state-of-the-art MC schedulers.