In December 1988, the Marine Systems Engineering Laboratory (MSEL) began a program, funded by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. EID-8818406), to investigate the key issues in the design of knowledge-based systems for use in Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) systems. It was directed at understanding some of the problems associated with utilizing these knowledge-based systems in real time domains. The efforts focused on establishing a symbolic processing environment which would exist on top of a real time operating system. This effort which builds on the results of the initial work, reflects the insights which were developed during the initial phase of this program. The investigations will be accomplished over a two year period and will result in the implementation of a intelligent real-time scheduler for expert systems running in Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) systems. It defines an effort to develop a scheduling algorithm in accordance with the criteria specified as a result of our previous work in designing real-time expert systems. The product of this effort will be a domain-independent scheduling algorithm suitable for use in any environment where multiple knowledge sources interact in a time-constrained fashion.
