Developing swarm robotics systems for real-time applications is a challenging mission. Task deadlines are among the kind of constraints which characterize a large set of real applications. This paper focuses on devising and analyzing a task allocation strategy that allows swarm robotics systems to execute tasks characterized by soft deadlines and to minimize the costs associated with missing th...

In addition to correctness requirements, a real-time system must also meet its temporal constraints, often expressed as deadlines. We call safety or mission critical real-time systems which may miss some deadlines critical soft real-time systems to distinguish them from hard real-time systems, where all deadlines must be met, and from soft real-time systems which are not safety or mission criti...

This paper discusses the timeliness of real-time control services as seen by the control engineering and real-time scientific communities, arguing that computer-controllers must be designed to meet performance deadlines that, under special circumstances, can be missed as long as hard deadlines are still met. Hard and performance deadlines are central to the design of fault-tolerant real-time sy...

We develop a two-person negotiation model with complete information that makes endogenous both the deadline and the level of surplus destruction after the deadline. We show that the undominated Nash equilibrium outcome is always unique but might be inefficient. Moreover, as the bargaining period becomes short or as the players become very patient, the unique undominated Nash equilibrium outcome...

We consider a task, demanding a sequence of efforts, that must be completed by a deadline. Effort is not contractible. Agents face shocks to their opportunity cost of time and are sometimes distracted from work. We show that agents who are often distracted may outperform agents who are distracted less often. The reason is that anticipation of distractions induces agents to start earlier for pre...

This paper addresses issues related t o guaranteeing synchronous messages with arbitrary deadline constraints in an FDDI network. We show that several network parameters must be set carefully i f message deadlines are to be satisfied. First, message deadlines can only be met if suficient synchronous bandwidth is allocated to each node. Thus, proper synchronous bandwidth allocation is essential ...