A genetic approach for scheduling non-preemptive tasks with precedence and deadline constraints

A real-time application is specified as a set of nonpreemptive tasks with precedence and deadline constraints. An offline algorithm for multiprocessor scheduling of nonpreemptive tasks with precedence and deadline constraints is proposed. Since this problem is known to be NP-hard, it has been traditionally solved by using list-based scheduling heuristics such as the minimum-laxity-first algorithm. In contrast, the authors propose a genetic algorithm based approach for solving this problem. Unlike the traditional scheduling algorithms, which do not perform well when there is considerable communication between the tasks, the proposed approach performs better as the communication requirements become more stringent. Results of an experimental evaluation comparing the proposed approach with the minimum-laxity-first heuristic are also presented