Cover Page Specification, Measurement, and Adjustment of Agent Autonomy: Theory and Implementation

Autonomy is an often cited but rarely agreed upon agent characteristic. Although no definition of agent autonomy is universally accepted, exploring the concept of autonomy offers many useful insights. Studying agent autonomy is important because it influences and is influenced by the degree of trust that agent designers and users place in their agents, the effectiveness of agent-based problem solving, and the organizational structure of agent-based systems. This article reviews previous discussions of agent autonomy and presents a core definition synthesized from these discussions. A representation for agent autonomy is presented along with a metric that can be used to assess an agent’s autonomy for each of the goals it pursues. These constructs in turn allow agent autonomy to be manipulated. As the demand for agent-based systems grows, the demand for agents capable of adjustable autonomy grows as well. Adjustable autonomy is a desirable agent characteristic because it (1) allows agent designers and users to gradually increase an agent’s “autonomy” as they become more confident in its operation and (2) allows agents to dynamically change some characteristics of their organizational structure to create the most effective problem-solving collaborations across run-time conditions. This article describes an implementation of a multi-agent system capable of adjustable autonomy and the autonomy mechanisms that make this implementation possible including autonomy-level agreements, autonomy-level commitment, and the autonomy model itself.