Fast Context Switching in Real-Time Propositional Reasoning

The trend to increasingly capable and affordable control processors has generated an explosion of embedded real-time gadgets that serve almost every function imaginable. The daunting task of programming these gadgets is greatly alleviated with real-time deductive engines that perform all execution and monitoring functions from a single core model, Fast response times are achieved using an incremental propositional deductive database (an LTMS). Ideally the cost of an LTMS's incremental update should be linear in the number of labels that change between successive contexts. Unfortunately an LTMS can expend a significant percentage of its time working on labels that remain constant between contexts. This is caused by the LTMS's conservative approach: a context switch first removes all consequences of deleted clauses, whether or not those consequences hold in the new context. This paper presents a more aggressive incremental TMS, called the ITMS, that avoids processing a significant number of these consequences that are unchanged. Our empirical evaluation for spacecraft control shows that the overhead of processing unchanged consequences can be reduced by a factor of seven.