Avoiding Resource Conflicts in Intelligent Agents

An intelligent agent should be rational, in particular it should at least avoid pursuing goals which are definitely conflicting. In this paper we focus on resource conflict in agents that use a plan library organised around goals. We characterise different types of resources and define resource requirements summaries. We give algorithms for deriving resource requirements, using resource requirements to detect conflict, and maintaining dynamic updates of resource requirements. We also discuss ways of resolving resource conflict. Our approach does not represent time, rather it keeps resource summaries current. This enables an agent’s decisions to be made on the basis of up-to-date information and allows us to develop efficient runtime (online) algorithms.