Affect-Inspired Resource Management in Dynamic, Real-Time Environments

We describe a novel affect-inspired mechanism to improve the performance of computational systems operating in dynamic environments. In particular, we designed a mechanism that is based on ideas from fear in humans to dynamically reallocate operating system-level resources to processes as they are needed to deal with time-critical events. We evaluated this system in MINIX and Linux in a simulated unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) testbed. We found the affect-based system was not only able to react more rapidly to time-critical events as intended, but since the dynamic processes for handling these events did not need to use significant CPU when they were not in time-critical situations, the simulated UAV was able to perform even non-emergency tasks at a higher level of efficiency and reactivity than was possible in the standard implementation.