Unifying Control in a Layered Agent Architecture

First International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Volume

First International Conference on Multiagent Systems

Contents

A unifying control framework for describing the individual control layers of the InteRRaP architecture for autonomous interacting agents is presented. InteRRaP is a pragmatic approach to designing complex dynamic agent societies, e.g.~for robotics and cooperative scheduling applications. It is based on three general functions describing how the actions an agent commits to are derived from its perception and from its mental model: {em belief revision and abstraction}, {em situation recognition and goal activation}, and {em planning and scheduling}. It is argued that each InteRRaP control layer - the behaviour-based layer, the local planning layer, and the cooperative planning layer - can be described by a combination of different instantiations of these control functions. The basic structure of a control layer is defined. The individual functions and their implementation in the different layers are outlined.