Reasoning about What to Plan

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 12

Student Abstracts

Agents plan in order to improve their performance. However, planning takes time and consumes resources that may in fact degrade an agents performance. Ideally, an agent should only plan when the expected improvement outweighs the expected cost and no resources should be expended on making this decision. To do this, an agent would have to be omniscient. The problem of how to approximate this ideal, without consuming too many resources in the process, is the meta-level control problem for a resource bounded rational agent.