Real-time object oriented intelligent control environment

An approach to the design of intelligent control systems is proposed that provides for design optimization and parallelization of intelligent control structures in an object-oriented environment. Embedded in the object-oriented formulation is an inheritance mechanism that gives the design a multilevel hierarchical structures and yields an efficient design migration path from top-level specifications to low-level control functions. The object-oriented modeling methodology, a colored Petri net extension, provides an optimization platform that is expected to mitigate the problem of combinatorial explosion. The Petri net structure allows easy parallelization, mapping to a heterogeneous computing environment based upon the capabilities of the individual processing elements