Recent critical embedded systems become more and more complex and usually react to their environment that requires to amend their behaviors by applying run-time reconfiguration scenarios. A system is defined in this paper as a set of networked devices where each of which has its own OS (Operating System), a processor to execute related periodic software tasks, and a local battery. A reconfiguration is any operation allowing the addition-removal-update of tasks to adapt the device and the whole system to its environment. It may be a reaction to a fault or even optimization of the system functional behavior. Nevertheless, such a scenario can cause the violation of real-time or energy constraints, which is considered a critical run-time problem. We propose a multi-agent adaptive architecture to handle dynamic reconfigurations and ensure the correct execution of the concurrent real-time distributed tasks under energy constraints. The proposed architecture integrates a centralized scheduler agent (ScA) which is the common decision making element for the scheduling problem. It is able to carry out the required run-time solutions based on operation research techniques and mathematical tools for the system’s feasibility. This architecture assigns also a reconfiguration agent (RAp) to each device p to control and handle the local reconfiguration scenarios under the instructions of ScA. A token-based protocol is defined in this case for the coordination between the different distributed agents in order to guarantee the whole system’s feasibility under energy constraints.
Published in IEEE Access journal, IEEE, Volume 6, pp 23152-23171.