The current development of low cost microprocessor components is providing an expansion of multimicroprocessor applications to resolve problems where time-critical needs exist. Typical application areas are robotics, nondestructive assembly line testing, defense systems. A key difficulty in the design of such systems is the development of the structure of the overall task(s) to be performed and their resulting distribution over the network of processors. The problem to be investigated is in the properties of critical real time distributed systems as they relate to the task structuring problem, and the corresponding development of algorithms which would be helpful to a designer in structuring (or partitioning) a task set for this type of application. Implicit in this work is the use of performance modelling methods to help establish the distributed system requirements needed to insure the desired performance level for a particular task structure. The research results will be used to develop a prototype, interactive design aid to allow system designers to explore and evaluate alternative task structures.
