PASA: Framework for partitioning and scheduling automation applications on multicore controllers

With multicore controllers becoming available for industrial automation applications, new tools and algorithms to compute efficient partitioning and scheduling solutions for control applications need to be developed. Optimizing the deployment and the schedule of a set of Function Block Diagrams on a parallel architecture are both NP hard. Additionally, control engineers need help to shift from the single core towards the multicore paradigm. By taking advantage of the parallelism inside the control applications it is effectively possible to decrease the finish times of the applications which enables to decrease their cycle times and improve the quality of service of the controller processes. This paper presents a practical solution to this problem that consists in a framework, called PASA, designed for partitioning and scheduling control applications modeled as function block diagrams. It enables new algorithms tailored to solve these optimization problems. This paper presents an extension of list-based DAG scheduling algorithms designed to compute a deployment and schedule for several control applications with different cycle times. The different variants of this algorithm are compared against each other as well as against some other existing solutions on a set of randomly generated examples.