CMPSCI 691V Spring 2000

Prof. Lesser Homework 3

Due in class Weds., April 26, 2000

Following is a list of some of the key intellectual ideas we have discussed on how to coordinate cooperative agents. Choose 5 ideas from this list of 8, and write 1-2 pages for each on why the idea is important, and how it relates to systems that were discussed in class and in the text.

1. Agent Flexibility in Open Environments

• Agents need to be able to adapt their local problem solving to the available resources and goals of the system.

- Long-term learning needs to be an integral part of an agent architecture

• Agents not restricted to solving one goal at a time but may flexibly interleave their activities to solve multiple goals concurrently

• Error resolution/management needs to be integral part of agent problem solving

1. Satisficing Control

• Less than optimal but still acceptable levels of coordination among agents is traded off for a significant reduction in computational costs to implement cooperative control.

• Emphasis on satisficing behavior subtly moves the focus from the performance of individual agents to the properties and character of the aggregate behavior of agents.

1. Interaction between Local and Non-Local Agent Control

• For effective agent coordination local agent control must have a certain level of sophistication in order to be able to understand what it has done, what is currently doing and what it intends to do

1. Agent Roles and Responsibilities for Large Agent Societies

• organizing agents in terms of roles and responsibilities can significantly decrease the computational burden of coordinating their activities.

1. Layered Control

• Modulation-higher layers providing constraints (policies) to lower levels that modulate (circumscribe) their control decisions

• Bi-directional Interaction(negotiation) among Layers - Though constraints flow down the layers, information that flows in the other direction allows these constraints to be modified in case they can't be met or they lead to inappropriate behavior

1. Situation Specificity

• There is no one best approach to organizing and controlling computational activities for all situations when the computational and resource costs of this control reasoning is taken into account.

1. Quantitative View of Coordination

• Efficient and effective coordination must account for the benefits and the costs of coordination in the current situation.

• Coordination can be seen as a distributed mechanism for approximating a global optimization problem of task assignment

1. Representing and Reasoning about Assumptions

• To the degree that the system can either re-derive or explicitly represent the assumptions behind these control decisions

• The more the system can effectively detect and diagnose the causes for inappropriate or unexpected agent behavior.