Improved scheduling of control tasks

The paper considers the implementation of digital controllers as real-time tasks in priority-preemptive systems. The performance of a digital feedback control system depends critically on the timing of its sampling and control actions. It is desirable to minimize the computational delay in the controller as well as the sampling jitter and the control jitter. It is shown that by scheduling the two main parts of a control algorithm as separate tasks, the computational delay can often be reduced significantly. A heuristic method for assigning deadlines to the parts is presented. Further modifications are given to reduce the jitter and to facilitate delay compensation. The result is improved control performance under maintained schedulability