Task translation and integration specification in intelligent machines

Intelligent machines are defined to be hierarchically intelligent control systems composed of three levels: the organization level, the coordination level, and the execution level. The authors present an analytical model for the coordination level of intelligent machines, which, together with the established mathematical formulation for the organization level and the well-developed control theory for the execution level, completes the first step toward a mathematical theory for intelligent machines. The framework of the coordination level is a tree structure consisting of a dispatcher and a number of coordinators. A new type of transducer, Petri net transducers (PNTs), is introduced to serve as the basic module in the analytical model. The PNTs can be used to represent the concurrence and conflict among the individual processes within the dispatcher and coordinators. Coordination structures are introduced as a formalism for the specification of integration in the coordination level. The task precedence relationship in the coordination process is presented by the Petri nets derived from the coordination structures. A case study is presented