Patent ID: 7788667

Claim:
A method for scheduling messages on a communications bus and scheduling tasks to be performed by a plurality of processors in an embedded system, said method comprising: identifying an earliest starting transmission time and a latest ending transmission time for each message to be transmitted on a communications bus to define a message transmission time-window for each message; identifying a task execution time-window for each task to be performed by each processor in the system based on the message transmission time-windows, wherein identifying an earliest starting transmission time and a latest ending transmission time and identifying a task execution time-window includes determining that all precedent constraints for the tasks are satisfied and all timing requirements for the messages are satisfied; determining a usage request function for the processors based on the task execution time-windows; determining a peak usage request and an average usage request for each processor based on the usage request function; optimizing the message transmission time-windows for each message within the earliest starting transmission time and the latest ending transmission time of each message by minimizing the peak usage request and the average usage request; and independently scheduling the tasks for each processor based on the optimized message transmission time-windows.