Congratulations to Anna Minaeva for having her article “Scalable and Efficient Configuration of Time-Division Multiplexed Resources” accepted in Journal of Systems and Software. The article is an extension of our conference paper “An Efficient Configuration Methodology for Time-Division Multiplexed Single Resources” that was presented at the Real-Time and Embedded Technology and Applications Symposium (RTAS) earlier this year. The original conference paper addresses the problem of configuring a Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) arbiter that provides access to a single shared resource, such as a memory, in a way the satisfies the bandwidth and latency requirements of all memory clients. This is achieved using an optimized Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation.
The newly accepted article extends the problem scope to consider more complex system with a larger number of memory clients and a longer TDM frame. For large problems, the previous ILP formulation takes unpractically long to solve, which is addressed by using it as a building block in a Branch and Price framework to improve its scalability. This approach decomposes the problem into smaller sub-problems and uses more sophisticated exploration methods to navigate the search-space, enabling the number of clients to be increased by up to a factor of 8 compared to the original ILP formulation.