Hardware-Enforced Semantic Coordination for Safety-Critical Real-Time Autonomous Systems

2026-07-02

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of achieving bounded, verifiable, and deterministic coordination in safety-critical real-time autonomous systems operating under uncertainty. It proposes a hardware-enforced semantic coordination architecture that, for the first time, directly maps a topic-based communication space Petri net (TB-CSPN) coordination mechanism onto the FPGA hardware layer. By leveraging hardware primitives to construct a native semantic coordination layer, the approach ensures deterministic execution of time synchronization, semantic gating, authorization constraints, and bounded coordination behaviors—without relying on software mediation. The design decouples low-level interaction management from high-level semantic reasoning, thereby preserving software adaptability while guaranteeing hardware-level reliability. This integration yields a highly dependable real-time system architecture with formally verifiable safety assurances, deterministic coordination, and bounded latency.

Abstract

Recent advances in agentic AI are producing increasingly complex autonomous systems that integrate large language models, world models, optimization engines, specialized neural architectures, autonomous platforms, and human operators. While much current research focuses on improving reasoning capabilities, safety-critical real-time deployment also requires bounded and verifiable coordination among heterogeneous components operating concurrently under uncertainty. Software-mediated coordination presents fundamental limitations in domains where bounded latency, deterministic coordination, and enforceable safety guarantees are essential. Hence, we propose a hardware-enforced semantic coordination architecture in which selected coordination semantics are implemented directly at the hardware level via field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The approach builds on the Topic-Based Communication Space Petri Net (TB-CSPN) framework, which separates semantic reasoning from interaction management. In this approach, selected TB-CSPN coordination mechanisms are mapped onto FPGA primitives, creating a hardware-native semantic coordination layer. Focus is not on acceleration, but on enforcing temporal synchronization, semantic gating, authorization constraints, and bounded coordination behavior directly in hardware. Semantic reasoning remains adaptive and software-driven, while embedded coordination semantics become deterministic.

Problem

• semantic coordination
• safety-critical systems
• real-time autonomy
• hardware enforcement
• heterogeneous components

Innovation

• hardware-enforced coordination
• semantic coordination
• FPGA
• TB-CSPN
• real-time autonomous systems