Security-Aware Scheduling of Mission Tasks under Temporal Constraints

Abstract

Recent years have seen a rapid increase in the use of heterogeneous distributed systems for deploying critical missions. This trend is motivated by the flexibility and great processing capabilities that such systems can offer. However, their inherent complexity makes them prone to a wide range of cyber attacks. Efficiently scheduling mission tasks under various temporal and security constraints is still an unsolved problem. Many scheduling algorithms have been proposed, but most of them only focus on meeting a mission's deadline, without considering the security requirements of each task. In this paper, we propose a heuristic algorithm for computing near-optimal mission schedules in a time-efficient manner. Our approach gives the flexibility of balancing execution time and security requirements, by relaxing some of the constraints when meeting all requirements is not feasible. Finally, we present experimental results showing that our approach is promising and encourages further research in this direction.