Complex task activation schemes in system level performance analysis

The design and analysis of today´s complex real-time systems requires advanced methods. Due to ever growing functionality, hardware complexity and component interaction, applying traditional methods like HW/SW co-simulation is getting increasingly difficult. On the other hand, analytic approaches have proven their usefulness and efficiency for system analysis when end-to-end performance figures like delay, throughput and memory consumption are requested. One of the main drawbacks of these methods is the limited set of systems that can be analyzed with high accuracy: Only simple models for task interaction and task semantics can be used. In this paper, we extend existing methods for analyzing heterogeneous multiprocessor systems such that (a) non-preemptive scheduling policies, (b) complex activation schemes for tasks and (c) conditional behavior of task executions can be modeled and analyzed. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed approach in a case study.