A matheuristic approach to large-scale avionic scheduling

Abstract

Pre-runtime scheduling of avionic systems is used to ensure that the systems provide the desired functionality at the correct time. This paper considers scheduling of an integrated modular avionic system which from a more general perspective can be seen as a multiprocessor scheduling problem that includes a communication network. The addressed system is practically relevant and the computational evaluations are made on large-scale instances developed together with the industrial partner Saab. A subset of the instances is made publicly available. Our contribution is a matheuristic for solving these large-scale instances and it is obtained by improving the model formulations used in a previously suggested constraint generation procedure and by including an adaptive large neighbourhood search to extend it into a matheuristic. Characteristics of our adaptive large neighbourhood search are that it is made over both discrete and continuous variables and that it needs to balance the search for feasibility and profitable objective value. The repair operation is to apply a mixed-integer programming solver on a model where most of the constraints are treated as soft and a violation of them is instead penalised in the objective function. The largest solved instance, with respect to the number of tasks, has 54,731 tasks and 2530 communication messages.

Exploring Trade-offs in Concept Design of Integrated Modular Avionic Platform Configurations : Topology Generation, Resource Adequacy, and Dependability

“…computing and communication resources) would be useful, however each problem is already quite complex to solve individually. For example, Karlsson et al [50] tried to address the joint problem of scheduling communication and computation tasks. Even with their state-of-theart optimization techniques, solving some instances of the problem still takes several hours.…”

Instance dataset for a multiprocessor scheduling problem with multiple time windows and time lags: Similar instances with large differences in difficulty

“…This problem is a simplification of the relaxation subproblem used in the Logic-Based Benders Decomposition (LBBD) scheme of [1] used to solve an avionics scheduling problem studied in [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. The simplification has been constructed so that the main characteristics and the computational behaviour of the relaxation subproblem is kept, but some of the technical details related to avionics scheduling are omitted.…”

“…Each instance in the dataset is constructed from a subproblem encountered when applying the LBBD scheme in [1] to a public avionics scheduling instance introduced in [2] . To construct an instance in the dataset, a subset of the master problem variables in the LBBD scheme are fixed to their values in a master problem solution.…”