This paper summarizes the evolution of our research on the Cooperative Intelligent Real-Time Control Architecture (CIRCA), one of the first AI architectures designed specifically for hard-real-time environments and architecturally-enforced performance guarantees. Beginning with the objective of providing reliable real-time execution of automatically-generated plans, CIRCA research progressed to define a rigorous link between planning models, execution semantics, and performance guarantees. Formal verification techniques and automatic abstraction methods were then incorporated to improve the rigor and performance of the planning system. Multi-agent negotiation and coordination capabilities were developed to demonstrate performance guarantees spanning distributed CIRCA agents. As the limitations of CIRCA's fully-guaranteed semantics became clear, the research grew to include probabilistic versions of the problem and new solution methods. Versions of CIRCA are capable of reasoning about durative concurrent actions, exogenous events and adversaries, nondeterministic actions, and probabilistic actions and events.
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