Design of major time frame for ARINC 653 partitioned real-time systems

The ARINC 653 standard for integrated modular avionics defines that the system adopts intra-partition scheduling and inter-partition scheduling. As specified by the standard, local scheduling is specified by partition application designers and partitions are scheduled statically by the major time frame. How to design the major time frame to schedule partitions is a problem in the phase of partition integrating. The bounded delay parameters of a partition are derived based on schedulability analysis and converted to parameters which can be used for partition scheduling afterwards. An algorithm referred to as the minimum number of windows fit-best fit (MFBF) is proposed to reduce the number of partition switches when partitions are scheduled to generate the major time frame. The proposed process from partition parameters deriving to inter-partition scheduling completes the design of the major time frame from several partition applications. Experimental results show that the MFBF algorithm reduces the number of partition switches effectively.