Resolving Conflicts in Agent Guidance
Karen L. Myers, David N. Morley · 2002
For agent technology to be accepted in real-world applica-tions, humans must be able to customize and control agent operations. One approach for providing such controllabil-ity is to enable a human supervisor to define guidance for agents in the form of policies that establish boundaries on agent behavior. This paper considers the problem of conflict-ing guidance for agents, making contributions in two areas: (a) outlining a space of conflict types, and (b) defining reso-lution methods that provide robust agent operation in the face of conflicts. These resolution methods combine a guidance-based preference relation over plan choices with an ability to extend the set of options considered by an agent when conflicts arise. The paper also describes a PRS-based guid-ance conflict-handling capability applied within a multiagent intelligence-gathering domain.