Abstract Application of the scheduling theory to the design of a distributed, real‐time networked measurement–control system is presented. Review of the priority‐based scheduling theory for the fixed priority assignment, system and task models, and application example are outlined. Emphasis is given to the processor and network utilization‐based test and to the task's worst‐case response time analysis. The same analysis approaches for task scheduling on single processor node and message scheduling across the network will be used. During the designing stage, scheduling of resources is decoupled and scheduling of each node and network is analyzed independently.