The control of reasoning in resource-bounded agents

Autonomous agents are systems capable of autonomous decision making in real-time environments. Computation is a valuable resource for such decision making, and yet the amount of computation that an autonomous agent may carry out will be limited. It follows that an agent must be equipped with a mechanism that enables it to make the best possible use of the computational resources at its disposal. In this paper, we review three approaches to the control of computation in resource-bounded agents. In addition to a detailed description of each framework, this paper compares and contrasts the approaches, and lists the advantages and disadvantages of each.