Expectations for agents with goal-driven autonomy

• Published in: Journal of experimental & theoretical artificial intelligence 2021-09, Vol.33 (5), p.867-889
• Main Authors: Dannenhauer, Dustin, Muñoz-Avila, Héctor, Cox, Michael T.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: agent's expectations; Algorithms; Autonomy; Cost benefit analysis; Empirical analysis; goal reasoning; Goal-driven autonomy
• ISSN: 0952-813X; 1362-3079
• DOI: 10.1080/0952813X.2020.1789755

Goal-driven autonomy is an agent model for managing a dynamic environment by reasoning about current and potential goals while planning and acting. Since unexpected events and conditions may cause an agent's goals and plans to become invalid or infeasible, an agent with goal-driven autonomy should monitor the environment against its expectations. Designed for dynamic, open, and partially observable environments, such an agent can create new goals or change its existing goals as needed. We present a formalisation of expectations for agents operating in these kinds of environments. Our formalisation includes situations where agents have the capability to sense the environment with some associated costs. We examine agent choices and behaviour in these domains and evaluate multiple approaches for selecting a subset of the agent's sensing actions to execute. The contributions of this work are (1) a specification of different approaches to generating expectations; (2) a formalisation of the autonomy problem that minimises sensing costs; (3) a complexity analysis of the problem; (4) new algorithms for deciding which sensing actions to perform; and (5) empirical results demonstrating the benefit and cost of these approaches.