From Instantaneous Schedulability to Worst Case Schedulability: A Significant Moment Approach

The method of significant moment analysis has been employed to derive instantaneous schedulability tests for real-time systems. However, the instantaneous schedulability can only be checked within a finite time window. On the other hand, worst-case schedulability guarantees schedulability of systems for infinite time. This paper derives the classical worst-case schedulability conditions for preemptive periodic systems starting from instantaneous schedulability, hence unifying the two notions of schedulability. The results provide a rigorous justification on the critical time instants being the worst case for scheduling of preemptive periodic systems. The paper also show that the critical time instant is not the only worst case moments.