Emotions to control agent deliberation

The execution of an artificial agent is usually implemented with a sense–reason–act cycle. This cycle includes tasks such as event processing, generating and revising plans, and selecting actions to execute. However, there are typicallymany choices in the design of such a cycle, which are often hard-coded in the cycle in an ad hoc way. The question of this paper is how one decides, in a principled way, how often and which reasoning rules to apply, how to interleave the execution of plans, or when to start replanning. This paper proposes and formalizes the eliciting conditions of hope, fear, joy, and distress according to a well-known psychologicalmodel of human emotion. These conditions are then used to reduce the choices an agent can make in each state. They formalize the idea that emotions focus an agent’s attention on what is important in each state.