About EDF

Hi, I'm Georg Lehner. Somewhere between 2019 and 2020 I was preparing some workshops and talks about time management for my collegues. One topic felt especially hard to me: task priorisation. Whatever method you use, you always have to take a step back, review your whole task list and think hard about your choices. In my experience, you don't have "time" when you are already under pressure.

While rethinking priorisation, I suddenly remembered the EDF scheduling method for real time embedded systems. It is the next contender for task scheduling after simple round robin scheduling – and it has the nice properties that it is near optimal for processor utilization, it is fair to all tasks and it gives a prediction about deliverability. Its disadvantage is, that EDF is more time consuming to do – in terms of milliseconds. Well, that should not be a problem for human task scheduling.

After testing EDF by hand for some time, I wanted to bring this to the next level. In September 2020 I wrote edfn a minimalistic EDF scheduling application and would hold a talk again, where I would present the method and offer the tool, in order to get feedback from other people.