Goal-driven blackboard control architecture based on extending partially complete general goal trees

A control architecture for goal-driven blackboard systems is introduced. The basic elements of the architecture are goals, policies, strategies, methods and knowledge sources. The basic control loop employs a bidding mechanism to determine the knowledge source to be executed at the current cycle. The architecture employs separate control and domain blackboards, and separate knowledge sources for the control problem and for representing the domain knowledge. The major characteristics of the architecture are that it has a simple and uniform structure, and that its basic control loop is based on a formal basis, namely, extending a partially complete general goal tree. The architecture is implemented in Smalltalk and tested on a multiple-task planning problem.