This paper presents a systematic approach which determines the optimal period to minimize performance measure subject to the schedulability constraints of a real-time control system by formulating the scheduling problem as an optimal problem. The performance measure is derived from the summation of end-to-end response times of processed I/Os scheduled by the static cyclic method. The schedulability constraint is specified in terms of allowable resource utilization. At first, a uniprocessor case is considered and then it is extended to a distributed system connected through a communication link, local-inter network, UN. This approach is applied to the design of an automotive body control system in order to validate the feasibility through a real example. By using the approach, a set of optimal periods can easily be obtained without complex and advanced methods such as branch and bound (B&B) or simulated annealing.