An Architecture for Planning in Embedded Systems

摘要

This work is focused on an architecture for systems which act inside an unpredictable world (embedded systems). Several systems dealing with the above issue have been proposed so far. We classify them by means of their architectures and algorithms, obtaining, for example, classical, deferred and reactive planning. From the systems developed up to now, we can point out some of the features that embedded systems must have. Namely, each system must have a flexible architecture, so it can deal with different problems. Each system must allow different basic activities, i.e., actuators and sensors controlling, plan formation and execution, and so on. Each system must have a flexible failure handling mechanism , since no action is guaranteed to succeed. In this paper, we propose a system called MRG which addresses the above features. Its architecture has several modules which can be combined in different ways depending on the problem. A module performs a basic activity. The system is able to detect and to react to failures. The architecture allows MRG a parallel activation of modules and a quick reaction to external events. The control of the architecture is reached by means of a planning language which has a small set of powerful control structures. MRG has been experimented in a complex large-scale application.