Solving a real-time allocation problem with constraint programming

In this paper, we present an original approach (CPRTA for “Constraint Programming for solving Real-Time Allocation”) based on constraint programming to solve a static allocation problem of hard real-time tasks. This problem consists in assigning periodic tasks to distributed processors in the context of fixed priority preemptive scheduling. CPRTA is built on dynamic constraint programming together with a learning method to find a feasible processor allocation under constraints. Two efficient new approaches are proposed and validated with experimental results. Moreover, CPRTA exhibits very interesting properties. It is complete (if a problem has no solution, the algorithm is able to prove it); it is non-parametric (it does not require specific tuning) thus allowing a large diversity of models to be easily considered. Finally, thanks to its capacity to explain failures, it offers attractive perspectives for guiding the architectural design process.