Dynamic Controllability of Temporally-flexible Reactive Programs

Abstract

In this paper we extend dynamic controllability of temporally-flexible plans to temporally-flexible reactive programs.  We consider three reactive programming language constructs whose behavior depends on runtime observations; conditional execution, iteration, and exception handling. Temporally-flexible reactive programs are distinguished from temporally-flexible plans in that program execution is conditioned on the runtime state of the world.  In addition, exceptions are thrown and caught at runtime in response to violated timing constraints, and handled exceptions are considered successful program executions.  Dynamic controllability corresponds to a guarantee that a program will execute to completion, despite runtime constraint violations and uncertainty in runtime state.  An algorithm is developed which frames the dynamic controllability problem as an AND/OR search tree over possible program executions.  A key advantage of this approach is the ability to enumerate only a subset of possible program executions that guarantees dynamic controllability, framed as an AND/OR solution subtree.