Maintenance goals of agents in a dynamic environment: Formulation and policy construction

The notion of maintenance often appears in the AI literature in the context of agent behavior and planning. In this paper, we argue that earlier characterizations of the notion of maintenance are not intuitive to characterize the maintenance behavior of certain agents in a dynamic environment. We propose a different characterization of maintenance and distinguish it from earlier notions such as stabilizability. Our notion of maintenance is more sensitive to a good-natured agent which struggles with an "adversary" environment, which hinders her by unforeseeable events to reach her goals (not in principle, but in case). It has a parameter k, referring to the length of non-interference (from exogenous events) needed to maintain a goal; we refer to this notion as k-maintainability. We demonstrate the notion on examples, and address the important but non-trivial issue of efficient construction of maintainability control functions. We present an algorithm which in polynomial time ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: AI
• Authors: Chitta Baral, Thomas Eiter, Marcus Bjäreland, Mutsumi Nakamura
• Keywords: AI 2008, Algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Dynamic Environment, K-maintainable Controls