Monitoring in Embedded Agents

Finding good monitoring strategies is an important process in the design of any embedded agent. We describe the nature of the monitoring problem, point out what makes it di cult, and show that while periodic monitoring strategies are often the easiest to derive, they are not always the most appropriate. We demonstrate mathematically and empirically that for a wide class of problems, the so-called \cupcake problems", there exists a simple strategy, interval reduction, that outperforms periodic monitoring. We also show how features of the environment may in uence the choice of the optimal strategy. The paper concludes with some thoughts about a monitoring strategy taxonomy, and what its de ning features might be. This research was supported by ARPA/Rome Laboratory under contract F30602-91-C-0076.