EASYR: Energy-Efficient Adaptive System Reconfiguration for Dynamic Deadlines in Autonomous Driving on Multicore Processors

The increasing computing demands of autonomous driving applications have driven the adoption of multicore processors in real-time systems, which in turn renders energy optimizations critical for reducing battery capacity and vehicle weight. A typical energy optimization method targeting traditional real-time systems finds a critical speed under a static deadline, resulting in conservative energy savings that are unable to exploit dynamic changes in the system and environment. We capture emerging dynamic deadlines arising from the vehicle’s change in velocity and driving context for an additional energy optimization opportunity. In this article, we extend the preliminary work for uniprocessors [ 66 ] to multicore processors, which introduces several challenges. We use the state-of-the-art real-time gang scheduling [ 5 ] to mitigate some of the challenges. However, it entails an NP-hard combinatorial problem in that tasks need to be grouped into gangs of tasks, gang formation, which could significantly affect the energy saving result. As such, we present EASYR, an adaptive system optimization and reconfiguration approach that generates gangs of tasks from a given directed acyclic graph for multicore processors and dynamically adapts the scheduling parameters and processor speeds to satisfy dynamic deadlines while consuming as little energy as possible. The timing constraints are also satisfied between system reconfigurations through our proposed safe mode change protocol. Our extensive experiments with randomly generated task graphs show that our gang formation heuristic performs 32% better than the state-of-the-art one. Using an autonomous driving task set from Bosch and real-world driving data, our experiments show that EASYR achieves energy reductions of up to 30.3% on average in typical driving scenarios compared with a conventional energy optimization method with the current state-of-the-art gang formation heuristic in real-time systems, demonstrating great potential for dynamic energy optimization gains by exploiting dynamic deadlines.