COOPERATION REQUIREMENTS PLANNING (CRP) FOR MULTIPROCESSORS - OPTIMALASSIGNMENT AND EXECUTION PLANNING

Cooperation is considered an essential attribute of intelligent multi- machine systems. It enhances their flexibility and reliability. Cooper ation Requirement Planning (CRP) is the process of generating a consis tent and coordinated global execution plan for a set of tasks to be co mpleted by a multi-machine system based on the task cooperation requir ements and interactions. CRP is divided into two steps: CRP-I which ma tches the task requirements to machine and system capabilities to gene rate cooperation requirements. It also generates task precedence, mach ine operation, and system resource constraints. CRP-II uses the cooper ation requirements and various constraints to generate a task assignme nt and coordinated and consistent global execution plan. The global ex ecution plan specifies an ordered sequence of actions and the machine sets that execute them such that the assigned tasks are successfully c ompleted, all the constraints are resolved, and the desired performanc e measure optimized. In this paper, we describe the CRP-II methodology based on the concepts of planning for multiple goals with interaction s. Each task is considered to be a goal, and the CRP-I process is view ed as generating alternate plans and associated costs to accomplish ea ch goal. Five different interactions are specified between the various plans: action combination, precedence relation, resource sharing, coo perative action, and independent action. The CRP-IT process is viewed as selecting a plan to satisfy each goal and resolving the interaction s between them. A planning strategy is proposed which performs plan se lection and interaction resolution simultaneously using a best-first s earch process to generate the optimal global plan.