Dennis W. Leinbaugh. Guaranteed response times in a hard real-time environment . Thus , as long as a system of independent preemptive tasks is not overloaded, it is possible to guarantee that all deadlines are met. Ideally, we would like to be able to guarantee that a given system will not become overloaded. However, such a guarantee is not always possible or practical.
Task scheduling is a significant area of research in real time computer systems.
An important performance metric of many scheduling algorithms is the processor utilization below which tasks are guaranteed to meet their deadlines. Leinbaugh, D. W. Guaranteed response time in a hard real-time environment . IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, January 1980. However , besides pe5 riodicity constraints, tasks may have resource requirements and can possess precedence, exclusion, communication, as well as replication constraints. Most of the algorithms adopt aspects from the branch and bound discipline in searching for a feasible schedule.