This research explores a cooperative intelligent real time control architecture (CIRCA) developed by the PIs as an alternative to traditional approaches that have limited the power of the AI methods or embedded "reactivity" into an AI system to achieve real time performance. The CIRCA architecture uses separate AI and real-time subsystems to address the problems for which each is designed. A structured interface allows the subsystems to communicate without compromising their respective performance goals. By reasoning about its own bounded reactivity, CIRCA can guarantee that it will meet hard deadlines while using AI methods whose time performance need not be accurately predictable. With its abilities to guarantee or trade off the timeliness, precision, confidence, and completeness of its output, CIRCA should provide more flexible performance than traditional systems. This project will develop the cooperative theory which supports CIRCA's performance guarantees as well as its experimental implementation and evaluation. The main emphasis is on CIRCA's ability to combine AI and real-time subsystems.
