marcel@saturn.ADS.COM (Marcel Schoppers) (01/16/90)
CALL FOR PARTICIPATION Interdisciplinary Workshop on Design Principles for Real-Time Knowledge Based Control Systems Workshop Committee: Dr. Paul Houpt, Prof. Victor Lesser, Dr. Ted Linden, Prof. Aloysius Mok, Dr. Marcel Schoppers This workshop will bring together people from the fields of artificial intelligence, control systems, mobile robots, operating systems, and software engineering, to identify foundational principles for the design of ``very complex'' realtime control systems, specifically including knowledge based control systems (KBCSs). Such systems must directly and constructively affect their environment, hence must cope with hard realtime constraints and asynchronous events, and must often utilize multiprocessor implementations. For KBCSs, key issues include, how to ensure graceful degradation of system behavior under exceptional loading or under uncertainty, and how to integrate reasoning with the hard deadlines on effector control. ``Design principles'' are application-independent heuristics that address key issues by constraining a system's hardware and software. Especially useful are principles that guide the decomposition of a system's functionality into modules or layers. Available layering schemes include the use of reflection (metalevels), domain model abstraction, functional abstraction (information hiding), and temporal abstraction (with higher layers having lower sampling rates). These schemes raise questions whose answers can be used as design principles. For example: How does a particular layering scheme address a key issue? Can some of the layering schemes be aligned -- e.g. under what conditions can abstract decisions be made less frequently than concrete ones? Is it possible to state principles for the effective dispersion of modules across processes and processors? The goal of this workshop is to promote interdisciplinary discourse and to discover relatively long-lasting foundations. Prospective attendees are invited to submit, by April 13th, a statement of up to 400 words (approx) detailing their relevant expertise, along with some suggestions for key issues, concepts, systems and papers (not necessarily original ones) that should be included in a book on design principles for KBCSs, and/or presented at the workshop in a 10-minute session, or presented at the workshop in a 30-minute session. The workshop committee will prefer attendees who have built functional systems AND have demonstrated the feasibility, utility or futility of an approach. The committee will also use the selected attendees' topic suggestions to design the workshop agenda, and will, by July 1st, ask some attendees to prepare oral presentations. The workshop will be held in Boston during July 29th -- August 3rd, in conjunction with the National Conference of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. After the workshop, attendees may be invited to prepare papers for inclusion in a book. Send submissions (preferably by electronic mail) to marcel@ads.com, or to Marcel Schoppers, Advanced Decision Systems, 1500 Plymouth Street, Mountain View, CA 94043.