Scheduling periodic tasks in a hard real-time environment

We give a rigorous account on the complexity landscape of an important real-time scheduling problem that occurs in the design of software-based aircraft control. The goal is to distribute tasks $\tau_i=(c_i,p_i)$ on a minimum number of identical machines and to compute offsets $a_i$ for the tasks such that no collision occurs. A task $\tau_i$ releases a job of running time $c_i$ at each time $a_i + k\cdot p_i$, $k\in\setN$ and a collision occurs if two jobs are simultaneously active on the same machine. Our main results are as follows: (i) We show that the minimization problem cannot be approximated within a factor of $n^{1-\epsilon}$ for any $\epsilon>0$. (ii) If the periods are dividing (for each $i,j$ one has $p_i \mid p_j$ or $p_j \mid p_i$), then there exists a 2-approximation for the minimization problem and this result is tight, even asymptotically. (iii) We provide asymptotic approximation schemes in the dividing case if the number of different periods is constant.