The trellis architecture for intelligent monitors

The process trellis is a software architecture that imposes a simple and regular organization on a complex, diverse set of parallel processes. The organization it imposes is well suited to parallel real-time monitors and expert systems. The trellis architecture is based on a hierarchical graph of decision processes, reflecting the conceptual hierarchy of the problem domain. All processes in the graph execute continuously and concurrently, and they communicate among themselves and with the outside world using a simple and uniform protocol. The trellis is amenable to parallel real-time scheduling strategies, to `abstraction strategies´ that synopsize the structure of complex trellises, and to visualization; it is a highly flexible architecture that seems well suited to a variety of domains. Extensive work on the trellis to date has focused both on design and analytical studies, and on the implementation, using C-Linda, of a substantial prototype trellis for patient monitoring in intensive care units