The Slack Method: A New Method for Static Allocation of Hard Real-Time Tasks

This article presents and evaluates the Slack Method, a new constructive heuristic for the allocation (mapping) of periodic hard real-time tasks to multiprocessor or distributed systems. The Slack Method is based on task deadlines, in contrast with other constructive heuristics, such as List Processing. The presented evaluation shows that the Slack Method is superior to list-processing-based approaches with regard to both finding more feasible solutions as well as finding solutions with better objective function values. In a comparative survey we evaluate the Slack Method against several alternative allocation techniques. This includes comparisons with optimal algorithms, non-guided search heuristics (e.g. Simulated Annealing), and other constructive heuristics. The main practical result of the comparison is that a combination of non-guided search and constructive approaches is shown to perform better than either of them alone, especially when using the Slack Method.