Planning and resource allocation for hard real-time, fault-tolerant plan execution
Ella M. Atkins, Tarek Abdelzaher, Kang Geun Shin, Edmund H. Durfee · 1999
We describe the interface between a real-time resource allocation system with an AI planner in order to create fault-tolerant plans that are guaranteed to execute in hard real-time.The planner specifies the task set and sll execution deadlines required to ensure system safety, then the resource allocator schedules these plans off-line to analyze execution platform resource utilization.A new interface module combines information from planning and resource allocation to enforce development of plans feasible for execution during a variety of internal system faults.Plans that over-utilize any system resource trigger feedback to the planner, which then searches for an alternate plan.A valid plan for each specified fault, including the nominal no-fault situation, is stored in a plan cache for subsequent real-time execution.We situate this work in the context of CIRCA, the Cooperative Intelligent Real-time Control Architecture, which focuses on developing and scheduling plans that make hard real-time safety guarantees, and provide an example of an autonomous aircraft agent to illustrate how our planner-resource allocation interface improves CIRCA performance.