A Formal Product-Line Engineering Approach for Schedulers

Scheduling techniques have been applied to a large category of software systems, such as, processor scheduling in operating systems, car scheduling in elevator systems, facility scheduling at airports, antenna scheduling in radar systems, scheduling of events, control signals and data in cyber-physical systems, etc. Designing and implementing software systems that incorporate scheduling techniques are not trivial, due to complexity, large size and safety-critical nature of such systems. To manage complexity, one may adopt domain-specific abstraction techniques. Adopting Software Product Line Engineering (SPLE) approaches can reduce the cost of developing large size of scheduling software. Built-in analysis tools may be utilized to assure that the scheduling process can be realized correctly. This paper introduces a comprehensive SPLE approach to foster reuse in implementing scheduler product families. As a part of the SPLE approach, a feature model, a wizard-based product configuration tool and a set of integrated verification tools have been designed and implemented. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in the literature that presents an SPLE approach in the scheduling domain which covers a large category of scheduling techniques, with built- in product configuration, implementation and verification tools.