The evolution of CIRCA, a theory-based AI architecture with real-time performance guarantees

This paper summarizes the evolution of our research on the Cooperative Intelligent Real-Time Control Archi-tecture (CIRCA), one of the first AI architectures de-signed specifically for hard-real-time environments and architecturally-enforced performance guarantees. Beginning with the objective of providing reliable real-time execution of automatically-generated plans, CIRCA research progressed to define a rigorous link between planning models, execution semantics, and performance guarantees. Formal verification techniques and automatic abstraction methods were then in-corporated to improve the rigor and performance of the plan-ning system. Multi-agent negotiation and coordination capa-bilities were developed to demonstrate performance guaran-tees spanning distributed CIRCA agents. As the limitations of CIRCA’s fully-guaranteed semantics became clear, the re-search grew to include probabilistic versions of the problem and new solution methods. Versions of CIRCA are capable of reasoning about durative concurrent actions, exogenous events and adversaries, nondeterministic actions, and prob-abilistic actions and events