Activity

Name

Activity --  A level of processing by the interpreter of an action type.

Description

A object of type Activity implements the processing of actions within an action plan. Each subtype of action plan has a corresponding subtype of Activity that implements processing of its respective type of plan.

The Activity types are part of the virtual processing machinery of an action plan interpreter. All the important elements of this machinery, including their current state of processing, are exposed to aid in development of general-purpose tools such as debuggers. Except for applications that need to create and run their own reflective activities, direct use of activity types by a modeling application should be rare.

A new activity object is created by each activateIn: message sent to an action type. activateIn: initializes a new activity object and prepares it for processing, but does not itself execute any actions. Subsequent messages, such as run, must be used to initiate processing within an activity. If an activity is activated to run under a swarm context, the owning swarm itself controls all processing within the subactivity.

An Activity type holds a tree of currently running, or a potentially runnable, subactivities. Each activity object represents a state of processing within a single action plan. The structure is a tree because multiple activities could be running or eligible to run at the same time. This occurs whenever two activities are specified as concurrent, either because are being performed by concurrent actions in some other plan, or because they were started for autonomous execution under the same swarm. When parallel processing machinery is present, each activity could also be advancing its own state independent of those of any other activity.

The current implementation supports only a single serial processor. Under serial execution, only one activity may be active at one time. This means that the current state of processing may be represented by a single stack of current activities that traces a path to a single leaf of the runnable activity tree. When running in serial mode, messages are available to obtain the currently running leaf activity or useful context information such as the current time available from it.

Protocols adopted by Activity

DefinedObject Drop RETURNABLE

Methods

Phase: Using