Decision Making and Plan Management by Autonomous Agents: Theory, Implementation and Applications

A generic architecture for autonomous agents is presented. In commonwith other current proposals the agent is capable of reacting to and reasoning about events which occur in its environment, executing actions and plans in order to achieve goals in the environment. In addition the agent can make decisions under uncertainty, including decisions about competing beliefs and alternative actions. The framework is grounded in a nonclassical decision model; this supports manymore capabilities than classical decision theory but under restricted conditions is compatible with it. The model is embodied in a well-dened knowledge representation language, R2L, which explicitly supports the central concepts of decisions and plans, and associated constructs of goals, arguments and commitments. The language provides a soundbasis for building knowledge based agents for practical applications including safety-critical ones. This is illustrated with examples of medical applications.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1997
• Where: AGENTS
• Authors: Subrata Kumar Das, John Fox, D. Elsdon, Peter Hammond
• Keywords: AGENTS 1997, Classical Decision Theory, Nonclassical Decision Model, Security Privacy, Well-de Ned Knowledge