Timing is everything: Analysis and synthesis of traffic patterns in event-triggered control

Event-triggered control (ETC) and self-triggered control (STC) are sample-and-hold control paradigms in which sensor data is only updated to the controller when necessary, often aperiodically, in contrast to the well-established periodic sampling paradigm. In ETC, a state-dependent event triggers a transmission, while in STC the controller...

Scheduling Workloads of Workflows in Clusters and Clouds

This dissertation addresses three key challenges that are characteristic to the online scheduling of workloads of workflows in modern distributed computing systems. The first challenge is the realistic estimation of the resource demand of a workflow, as it is important for making good task placement and resource allocation decisions. Usually,...

Robust scheduling in an uncertain environment

This thesis presents research on scheduling in an uncertain environment, which forms a part of the rolling stock life cycle logistics applied research and development program funded by Dutch railway industry companies. The focus therefore lies on scheduling of maintenance operations on rolling stock in the railway industry. The first chapter...

Algorithms for Simple Temporal Reasoning

This dissertation describes research into new methods for automated temporal reasoning. For this purpose, several frameworks are available in literature. Chapter 1 presents a concise literature survey that provides a new overview of their interrelation. In the remainder of the dissertation, the focus is on quantitative frameworks, i.e. temporal...

Coordinated Multi-Agent Planning and Scheduling

Coordinating autonomous planning and scheduling

Understanding and Improving the Performance Consistency of Distributed Computing Systems

With the increasing adoption of distributed systems in both academia and industry, and with the increasing computational and storage requirements of distributed applications, users inevitably demand more from these systems. Moreover, users also depend on these systems for latency and throughput sensitive applications, such as interactive...

Efficient Runtime Management of Reconfigurable Hardware Resources

Runtime reconfigurable systems built upon devices with partial reconfiguration can provide reduction in overall hardware area, power efficiency, and economic cost in addition to the performance improvements due to better customization. However, the users of such systems have to be able to afford some additional costs compared to hardwired...

Runtime Support for Heterogeneous Multi-core Systems

Multi-core processing platforms are one of the major steps forward in offering high-performance computing platforms. The idea is to increase the performance by employing more processing elements to perform a job. However, this creates a challenge for both hardware developers who build such systems and software designers who program those...

Application-Oriented Scheduling in Multicluster Grids

Grid computing appeared in the mid 1990s with the vision of sharing geographically dispersed large computational resources for executing computation-intensive scientific applications. Today, we can name numerous grid projects that run successfully to solve challenging scientific problems such as the grid project of European Organization for...

Improving real-time train dispatching: Models, algorithms and applications

Traffic controllers monitor railway traffic sequencing train movements and setting routes with the aim of ensuring smooth train behaviour and limiting as much as existing delays. Due to the strict time limit available for computing a new timetable during operations, which so far is rather infeasible by using existing tools, railway traffic...

The design and implementation of the KOALA grid resource management system

Grid computing is an emerging form of distributed computing, distinguished from traditional forms by its focus on large-scale, multi-organizational resource sharing and innovative applications. To harness shared resources across multiple organizations, and at the same time to deal with the challenges of grid resource management and of deploying...

Scheduling in high performance buffered crossbar switches

High performance routers are the basic building blocks of the Internet. Most high performance routers built today use crossbars and a centralized scheduler. Due to their high scheduling complexity, crossbar-based routers are not scalable and cannot keep pace with the explosive growth of the Internet. This dissertation studies a slight variation...

Stochastic modelling of train delays and delay propagation in stations

A trade-off exists between efficiently utilizing the capacity of railway networks and improving the reliability and punctuality of train operations. This dissertation presents a new analytical probability model based on blocking time theory which estimates the knock-on delays of trains caused by route conflicts and late transfer connections in...

Share scheduling in distributed systems