Scheduler

The scheduler is the component of the blackboard system that actually executes the knowledge sources – but first, it schedules them, that is, it decides the order in which knowledge sources waiting in the agenda get executed. This order is rescheduled after every execution of a knowledge source, since the conditions determining the order may have changed, or new knowledge sources may be present in the agenda that are more urgent.

The following factors influence the order of execution of knowledge sources:

  • Knowledge sources have a property called attentional priority. Knowledge sources with higher priority get executed before knowledge sources with lower priority. This priority can be set by the knowledge source itself, by other knowledge sources or from outside the system. The BlackboardMonitor provides a method for setting focus on a knowledge source (increasing its priority), along with the option to propagate this higher priority down along the dependency chain of this knowledge source. The dependency chain is determined by the event bindings.
  • Knowledge sources must implement a method canExecute, that returns whether or not the knowledge source can execute at this moment, and which is called by the scheduler if the knowledge source is first on the scheduling list. If it cannot execute, the knowledge source can decide whether to remain in the agenda or be removed from it.
  • Knowledge sources define a maximum invocation frequency, that cannot be exceeded. It is a maximum frequency, because knowledge sources get not necessarily executed periodically, since they are triggered by events, but not by timers. The scheduler checks whether the last execution time was long enough ago before considering the knowledge source for execution. Until then, it remains in the agenda.

This listing shows the relevant parts of the interface with respect to influencing the scheduling:

class BlackboardMonitor
    methods
        focusOn( ks, propagateDown )
        resetFocus()

class AbstractKS
    properties
        invocationMaxFrequency_Hz;
    methods (Abstract)
        canExecute()
        execute()
    methods
        focus()
        unfocus()