A statecharts-based specification and verification of real-time job scheduling systems

Abstract

Real-time job scheduling is a difficult problem. The job scheduling system receives jobs from environment, each job with its own real-time deadline. Queueing and scheduling may still be necessary, in order to maximize the processor usage and also to impose job priorities. In order to compare different scheduling algorithms, formal methods to specify the real-time job scheduling system are necessary, so that properties of the algorithms may be tested against the specified model, prior to implementation. This paper develops a statecharts-based specification for real-time job scheduling systems, and compares it to the modal primitive recursive arithmetic of Yodaiken and Ramamritham.