Implementing soft real-time agent control

Real-time control has become increasingly important as technologies are moved from the lab into real world situations. The complexity associated with these systems increases as control and autonomy are distributed, due to such issues as precedence constraints, shared resources, and the lack of a complete and consistent world view. In this paper we describe a real-time environment requiring distributed control, and how we modified our existing multi-agent technologies to meet this need. Two types of enhancements are covered: those which enable planning to meet real-time constraints, such as our task representation, meta-level costing, alternative plan selection, and partial-order scheduling, and those which facilitate on-line real-time control, including scheduling flexibility, caching, and windowed commitments.