In my last post, Execution order and Simulink models, I promised a look at scheduling best practices using Stateflow; in this post I hope to deliver.

Simple periodic scheduling

In our first example we will look at simple periodic schedulers. Let’s assume we have a system with three rates, 0.01 sec, 0.1 and 0.2 seconds. This can easily be implemented in Stateflow with the following chart.

If we look at the “activation” for each of the task sets we would see the following.

In this case you can see that each of the tasks are being triggered at their given rate, at 0.1 second both the 0.01 and 0.1 activate; at 0.2 all three are active. In many cases this is fine, the order in which these tasks is set by the order in the chart (e.g. 0.01, 0.1 then 0.2). However you may want to “space out” the activation. In that case a Stateflow chart like this would be the solution.

In this case three parallel states are created. The 0.1 and 0.2 rates have “offsets” so that the execute out of sync with the each of the tasks as shown in the resulting execution graph.

Mode based scheduling

Beyond rate based scheduling mode based scheduling is the next iteration of the scheduling examples.

In this example the scheduler is decomposed into three parallel states, the “Main” or rate based state; a mode based state and an event based state. The main state is similar to the two previous examples so lets look at Mode and Event.

There are three things of note here; first within this state we start the system off in the “Initialization” state. This is a safe selection as most systems start off in “Init”. Next, movement between the states is controlled by the input variable “Mode”. Use of the ‘hasChanged’ method gates the transitions between the different modes allowing the user to switch from any of the modes without having complex routing logic. Finally the mode “Emergency” is for the non-critical scheduling responses to emergencies. Any actions that fall into the true emergency mode should be event driven so their execution starts immediately.

Our final example here is event driven scheduling; within this chart we have the “React” states and a “Null” state. The null state is present to provide a “no-operations” mode when the events are not active. Two things of note, in this example events are mutually exclusive; this does not need to be the case. Second, the current example exits the “React” states after one execution. The exits could be guarded to continue execution until the event is resolved.

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