Controlling cooperative experts in a real time system

Distributed problem solving nodes (so-called experts) may face severe time constraints in some real applications. In such circumstances, experts should not only cooperate with each other to solve large and complicated problems but also meet real-time constraints in order to make the solutions effective. The authors present a blackboard-based monitor which takes full responsibility to control experts distributed in the cooperative problem solving system. They claim this monitor can support different styles of cooperation between experts and sophisticated task scheduling behaviours local to each expert which are crucial for real-time applications. The authors also highlight the ability of the monitor to dynamically choose cooperation policies and adjust local task scheduling behaviours according to the rapidly changing environment under real-time constraints