A method for scheduling tasks to a cyclic schedule, comprising maintaining a request queue, a count, the count being initialized to a given limit, and an index of a current time slot within the schedule. Periodically, if the request queue contains a reference to an urgent task among the tasks, that reference is removed from the request queue and the urgent task is dispatched and if the request queue is empty, the index is advanced to the next time slot within the schedule. If the next time slot is statically assigned to a task among the tasks, that task is dispatched, and if the next time slot is unassigned and the count is below the limit, the count is incremented and the index is further advanced to the next but one time slot.