Avoiding resource conflicts in intelligent agents
John Thangarajah, Lin Padgham · 2002
Abstract. An intelligent agent should be rational, in particular itshould at least avoid pursuing goals which are definitely conflicting. In this paper we focus on resource conflict in agents that use aplan library organised around goals. We characterise different types of resources and define resource requirements summaries. We givealgorithms for deriving resource requirements, using resource requirements to detect conflict, and maintaining dynamic updates ofresource requirements. We also discuss ways of resolving resource conflict. Our approach does not represent time, rather it keeps re-source summaries current. This enables an agent's decisions to be made on the basis of up-to-date information and allows us to developefficient runtime (online) algorithms. 1 Introduction An intelligent agent should be rational. Part of being rational is toavoid actions that interfere with each other. A rational agent should not simultaneously pursue a goal G1 and a goal G2 if G1 prevents theachievement of