Progress: an approach for defining and monitoring non deterministic design-to-time methods

Guaranteed response time is one of the most important issues encountered in designing real time systems. The AI community has developed various approaches to solve this problem, e.g. anytime algorithms, approximate processing, design to time scheduling and progressive reasoning. All these approaches rely on a trade-off between run time and quality of results. In the framework of the ESPRIT projects Nos. 5145 and 7805 REAKT (Real time Knowledge Tool), we have developed a similar approach called PROGRESS (PROGressive REasoning System). PROGRESS manages AI tasks with hard and soft deadlines, provided that competing methods are available for the tasks to be solved. A comparison was made between our model and a conventional algorithm (Earliest Deadline Algorithm) and showed the higher robustness and efficiency of PROGRESS.