The Use of the Blackboard Architecture for a Decision Making System for the Control of Craft with Various Actuator and Movement Capabilities

This paper provides an overview of an approach to the control of multiple craft with heterogeneous movement and actuation characteristics that is based on the Blackboard software architecture. An overview of the Blackboard architecture is provided. Then, the operational and mission requirements that dictate the need for autonomous control are characterized and the utility of the Blackboard architecture is for meeting these requirements is discussed. The performance of a best-path solver and naïve solver are compared. The results demonstrate that the best-path solver outperforms the naïve solver in the amount of time taken to generate a solution, however, the number of solver-runs to be executed against the Blackboard must be sufficient to allow the lower individual-run times to offset the time required to propagate the data utilized by the best-path solver for solution generation through the database. The existence of other justifications for this approach (even if the number of runs for each data propagation cycle is not sufficient) is also discussed.