Reliable real-time cooperation of mobile autonomous systems

Autonomous systems are expected to provide increasingly complex and safety-critical services that will, sooner or later, require the cooperation of several autonomous systems for their fulfillment. In particular, coordinating the access to shared physical and information technological resources will become a general problem. Scheduling these resources is subject to strong real-time and reliability requirements. In this paper, we present an architecture that allows autonomous mobile systems to schedule shared resources in real-time using their own wireless distributed infrastructure. In our architecture, there is a clear separation between the application-specific scheduling part that is modeled as a function of the global state and the communication part that is used to provide the global state. By isolating the more error-prone communication part within a communication hardcore, the reliability of the overall system is increased and the locally executed scheduling function can be designed with primary focus on the application-specific real-time requirements.