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Detecting & exploiting positive goal interaction in intelligent agents

Published: 14 July 2003 Publication History

Abstract

Rational agents typically pursue multiple goals in parallel. However most existing agent systems do not have any infrastructure support for reasoning about either positive or negative interactions between goals. Negative interactions include such things as competition for resources, which if unrecognised can lead to unnecessary failure of both goals requiring the resource. Positive interactions include situations where there is potentially a common subgoal of two goals. This paper looks at mechanisms for identifying potential common subgoals, and attempting to schedule the actions of the agent to take advantage of this. Potential common subgoals are identified by maintaining summaries of definite and potential effects of goals and plans to achieve those goals. Template summaries for goal types are produced at compile time, while instance summaries are maintained and updated at execution time to allow the agent to choose and schedule its plans to take advantage of potential commonality where possible. This increases the ability of the agent to act in a rational manner, where rational is loosely defined as the sensible behaviour exhibited by humans.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      AAMAS '03: Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
      July 2003
      1200 pages
      ISBN:1581136838
      DOI:10.1145/860575
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 14 July 2003

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      Author Tags

      1. co-ordinating plans
      2. goal interactions
      3. rational agents

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      • (2024)Verifying Multi -Agent Coordination Correctness for BDI Agents2024 IEEE 48th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC)10.1109/COMPSAC61105.2024.00013(21-26)Online publication date: 2-Jul-2024
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