Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca

Author(s): Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, Benjamin Asch, Gustavo Quiros, Akash Ahmad, Marten Lohstroh, Ankit Shukla, Malte Clement, Edward A. Lee, and Reinhard von Hanxleden

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 propose a dataflow extension to BTs that explicitly models data relations and communication. We realize and validate that approach in the recently introduced polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca (LF).

Electronic Downloads

• https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639478.3643093

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Citation Formats

• APA
  

                  
  Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, Benjamin Asch, Gustavo Quiros, Akash Ahmad, Marten Lohstroh, Ankit Shukla, Malte Clement, Edward A. Lee, and Reinhard von Hanxleden. (2024). Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca. In International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion).                       
                  
                  

• MLA
  

                  
  Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, Benjamin Asch, Gustavo Quiros, Akash Ahmad, Marten Lohstroh, Ankit Shukla, Malte Clement, Edward A. Lee, and Reinhard von Hanxleden. "Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca." International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion), 2024.                       
                  
                  

• Chicago
  

                  
  Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, Benjamin Asch, Gustavo Quiros, Akash Ahmad, Marten Lohstroh, Ankit Shukla, Malte Clement, Edward A. Lee, and Reinhard von Hanxleden. "Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca." International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion), 2024.                       
                  
                  

• BibTeX
  

                      
  @inproceedings{SchulzRosengartenEtAl:24:BehaviorTrees,
  	author = {Alexander Schulz-Rosengarten, Benjamin Asch, Gustavo Quiros, Akash Ahmad, Marten Lohstroh, Ankit Shukla, Malte Clement, Edward A. Lee, and Reinhard von Hanxleden},
  	title = {Behavior Trees with Dataflow: Coordinating Reactive Tasks in Lingua Franca},
  	booktitle = {International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion)},
  	month = {April},
  	year = {2024},
  	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 propose a dataflow extension to BTs that explicitly models data relations and communication. We realize and validate that approach in the recently introduced polyglot coordination language Lingua Franca (LF).},
  	URL = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639478.3643093}}