Developing Mechanisms for Determining "Good Enough" in SORT Systems

In order for a self-organizing real time (SORT) system to produce real time behavior that is "good enough," it must have the ability to trade off among competing performance metrics, of which time is only one. In this paper we discuss what some of those trade-offs are at both "design time" and during operations, present some examples of how biological systems create mechanisms to support the fast resolution of trade-offs, and then present a feasibility demonstration by considering a very simple example of how such trade-off mechanisms can be implemented in our SORT testbed.