Hardware-Enforced Semantic Coordination for Safety-Critical Real-Time Autonomous Systems
For developers of safety-critical autonomous systems, this work provides a method to enforce deterministic coordination and safety guarantees that software-mediated approaches cannot achieve.
The paper addresses the challenge of bounded and verifiable coordination among heterogeneous components in safety-critical real-time autonomous systems. It proposes a hardware-enforced semantic coordination architecture using FPGAs to implement coordination semantics directly in hardware, achieving deterministic temporal synchronization and safety guarantees.
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.