Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca
Abstract
Behavior Trees (BTs) provide a lean set of control flow elements that are easily composable in a modular tree structure. They are well established for modeling the high-level behavior of non-player characters in computer games and recently gained popularity in other areas such as industrial automation. While BTs nicely express control, data handling aspects so far must be provided separately, e. g. in the form of blackboards. This may hamper reusability and can be a source of nondeterminism. We here present a dataflow extension to BTs that explicitly models data relations and communication. We provide a combined textual/graphical approach in line with modern, productivity-enhancing pragmatics-aware modeling techniques. We realized and validated that approach in the recently introduced polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca (LF).
Cite
@article{arxiv.2401.09185,
title = {Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca},
author = {Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten and Akash Ahmad and Malte Clement and Reinhard von Hanxleden and Benjamin Asch and Marten Lohstroh and Edward A. Lee and Gustavo Quiros Araya and Ankit Shukla},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.09185},
year = {2024}
}