Interruptible Processing
Interruption is the process by which an external event can trigger
an agent to attend to the event. Interruption may be compared to
polling. In polling systems, the agent spends a part of its execution
cycle looking for new external events but the events themselves do not
have the capability to divert control immediately. Since interrupts
may occur
asynchronously,
an interruptible agent must have a way to
efficiently store the current behavior context in order to return to
it after the interrupt has been serviced. Such structured return to a
previous state is exemplified by
goal reconstruction, just one of many
methods in which an architecture may be given an explicit capability
to
respond intelligently to the
interruption event.
Interruptibility adds to an agent's
reactivity and
efficiency. However, interruptibility
can also cause problems in behavioral
salience and
coherence, especially when the
interrupts are not
prioritized
according to their (relative) importance.
Architectures having this agent property include:
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