A Control-Theoretical Approach to Performance Guarantees in Performance-Critical Systems

University Of Virginia Main Campus, Charlottesville VA

Investigators

Abstract

Many important applications must provide guaranteed real-time performance in spite of uncertain workloads, highly varying computation times for tasks, and with a large number of interacting sites. Examples of such applications include smart spaces, financial markets on the Internet, collections of factories supporting agile manufacturing, and high-tech battlefield coordination. The objective of this research is to develop a software-oriented theory and practice of feedback control that will provide aggregate performance guarantees for these types of systems. Methods to embed such controllers in the operating systems of these types of applications is investigated. The ultimate vision of this research is that software designers will be able to model parts of software systems and use those models to develop software control algorithms based on a theory of feedback control. This work establishes a scientific basis upon which to design and analyze the aggregate behavior of large systems that operate under a great deal of uncertainty. The solutions can be embedded in operating systems to meet the performance specs in transient and steady states, such as deadline miss ratio, stability, overshoot, settling time, and sensitivity requirements.