antitative Modeli utational Task
Keith Decker, Victor Lesser · 1993
Formal approaches to specifying how the mental state of an agent entails that it perform particular actions put the agent at the center of analysis. For some questions and purposes, it is more realistic and convenient for the center of analysis to be the task environment, domain, or society of which agents will be a part. This paper presents such a task environment-oriented modeling framework that can work hand-in-hand with more agent-centered approaches. Our approach features careful attention to the quantitative computational interrelationships between tasks, to what information is available (and when) to update an agent’s mental state, and to the general structure of the task environment rather than single-instance examples. A task environment model can be used for both analysis and simulation; it avoids the methodological problems of relying solely on single-instance examples, and provides concrete, meaningful characterizations with which to state general theories. This paper will give an example of a model in the context of cooperative distributed problem solving, but our framework is used for analyzing centralized and parallel control as well. ntroduction This paper presents a framework, TEMS (Task Analysis, Environment Modeling, and Simulation), with which to model complex computational task environments that is compatible with both formal agent-centered approaches and experimental approaches. The framework allows us to both analyze and quantitatively simulate the behavior of single or multi-agent systems with respect to interesting characteristics of the computational task environments of which they are part. We believe that it provides the correct level of abstraction for meaningfully evaluating centralized, parallel, and distributed control algorithms for sophisticated knowledge based systems. No previous characterization formally *This work was supported by DAKPA contract N00014-92-J1698, Office of Naval Research contract N00014-92-J-1450, and NSF contract CDA 8922572. The content of the information does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the Government and no official endorsement should be inferred.