Unifying Control in a Layered Agent Architecture

In this paper we set up a unifying perspective of the individual con trol layers of the architecture InteRRaP for autonomous interacting agents InteRRaP is a pragmatic approach to designing complex dynamic agent societies e g for robotics M uller Pischel a and cooperative scheduling applications Fischer et al It is based on three general functions describ ing how the actions an agent commits to are derived from its perception and from its mental model belief revision and abstraction situation recognition and goal activation and planning and scheduling It is argued that each InteRRaP control layer the behaviour based lay er the local planning layer and the cooperative planning layer can be de scribed by a combination of di erent instantiations of these control functions The basic structure of a control layer is de ned The individual functions and their implementation in the di erent layers are outlined We demonstrate various options for the design of interacting agents with in this framework by means of an interacting robots application The per formance of di erent agent types in a multiagent environment is empirically evaluated by a series of experiments The work presented in this paper has been supported by the German Ministry of Research and Technology under grant ITW email jpm dfki uni sb de