Publication - The Soft Real-Time Agent Control Architecture

Authors: Horling, Bryan; Lesser, Victor; Vincent, Regis and Wagner, Thomas
Title: The Soft Real-Time Agent Control Architecture
Abstract: Real-time control has become increasingly important as technologies are moved from the lab into real world situations. The complexity associated with these systems increases as control and autonomy are distributed, due to such issues as temporal and ordering constraints, shared resources, and the lack of a complete and consistent world view. In this paper we describe a soft real-time architecture designed to address these requirements, motivated by challenges encountered in a real-time distributed sensor allocation environment. The system features the ability to generate schedules respecting temporal, structural and resource constraints, to merge new goals with existing ones, and to detect and handle unexpected results from activities. We will cover a suite of technologies being employed, including quantitative task representation, alternative plan selection, partial-order scheduling, schedule consolidation and execution and conflict resolution in an uncertain environment. Technologies which facilitate on-line real-time control, including meta-level accounting, schedule caching and variable time granularities are also discussed.
Keywords: Agent Control, ANTs, DTC, JAF, Multi-Agent Systems, Real Time, Resource Bounded, Scheduling, TAEMS
Publication: Proceedings of the AAAI/KDD/UAI-2002 Joint Workshop on Real-Time Decision Support and Diagnosis Systems
Date: July 2002
Sources: PDF: /Documents/bhorling/RTDSDS2002-SRTA.pdf
Notes: Also available as UMass Computer Science Tech Report 02-14.
Reference: Horling, Bryan; Lesser, Victor; Vincent, Regis and Wagner, Thomas. The Soft Real-Time Agent Control Architecture. Proceedings of the AAAI/KDD/UAI-2002 Joint Workshop on Real-Time Decision Support and Diagnosis Systems. July 2002. Also available as UMass Computer Science Tech Report 02-14.
bibtex: 
@article{Horling-221,
  author    = "Bryan Horling and Victor Lesser and Regis Vincent
               and Thomas Wagner",
  title     = "{The Soft Real-Time Agent Control Architecture}",
  journal   = "Proceedings of the AAAI/KDD/UAI-2002 Joint
               Workshop on Real-Time Decision Support and
               Diagnosis Systems",
  month     = "July",
  year      = "2002",
  url       = "http://mas.cs.umass.edu/paper/221",
}