Constraint-Based Agents: The ABC's of CBA's

The Constraint-Based Agent (CBA) framework is a set of tools for designing, simulating, building, verifying, optimizing, learning and debugging controllers for agents embedded in an active environment. The agent and the environment are modelled symmetrically as, possibly hybrid, dynamical systems in Constraint Nets, as developed by Zhang and Mackworth. This paper is a tutorial overview of the development and application of the CBA framework, emphasizing the important special case where the agent is an online constraint-satisfying device. Here it is often possible to verify complex agents as obeying real-time temporal constraint specifications and, sometimes, to synthesize controllers automatically. The CBA framework demonstrates the power of viewing constraint programming as the creation of online constraint-solvers in dynamic environments.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: CP
• Authors: Alan K. Mackworth
• Keywords: Artificial Intelligence, CBA Framework, Constraint-Based Agent, CP 2000, Real-time Temporal Constraint