Modeling and Scheduling of Fusion Patterns in Autonomous Driving Systems (Extended Version)

In Autonomous Driving Systems (ADS), Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) are widely used to model complex data dependencies and inter-task communication. However, existing DAG scheduling approaches oversimplify data fusion tasks by assuming fixed triggering mechanisms, failing to capture the diverse fusion patterns found in real-world ADS software stacks. In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for analyzing various fusion patterns and their performance implications in ADS. Our framework models three distinct fusion task types: timer-triggered, wait-for-all, and immediate fusion, which comprehensively represent real-world fusion behaviors. Our Integer Linear Programming (ILP)-based approach enables an optimization of multiple real-time performance metrics, including reaction time, time disparity, age of information, and response time, while generating deterministic offline schedules directly applicable to real platforms. Evaluation using real-world ADS case studies, Raspberry Pi implementation, and randomly generated DAGs demonstrates that our framework handles diverse fusion patterns beyond the scope of existing work, and achieves substantial performance improvements in comparable scenarios.