This proposal is for a research program that investigates key issues in the design of knowledge based systems for use in Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) systems. It defines an effort to understand some of the problems associated with utilizing knowledge based systems in real time systems. The purpose of this research is to implement a framework for further development of real time knowledge based systems. this framework will be realized with the development of an operating system and system architecture applicable to time constrained symbolic systems. The main product of this effort will be a new symbolic processing operating system which will be used as the foundation for current and future development in intelligent time constrained systems. The proposed research addressed the underlying issues which lead to capable real time systems. Knowledge based techniques will be advanced by first addressing the design from the vantage of operating systems and system architecture. The proposed work will take advantage of current real time operating system technology. Once the architecture a and application is chosen it will be implemented on the MSEL integrated symbolic numeric system residing on the Ironics IV 3204 32 bit CPU board for VME bus. The testing phase will include the determination and measurement of key real time system parameters as well as benchmarks. At this point there are no clear measures of performance other than simplistic cycle rate determinations. For this reason a task is included to determine useful metrics for evaluating time constrained knowledge-based systems. In the final phase of this work we will evaluate the results to determine performance limitations and propose enhancements to the system.
