Detecting and exploiting positive goal interaction in intelligent agents

Rational agents typically pursue multiple goals in parallel. However most existing agent systems do not have any infrastructure support for reasoning about either positive or negative interactions between goals. Negative interactions include such things as competition for resources, which if unrecognised can lead to unnecessary failure of both goals requiring the resource. Positive interactions include situations where there is potentially a common subgoal of two goals. This paper looks at mechanisms for identifying potential common subgoals, and attempting to schedule the actions of the agent to take advantage of this. Potential common subgoals are identified by maintaining summaries of definite and potential effects of goals and plans to achieve those goals. Template summaries for goal types are produced at compile time, while instance summaries are maintained and updated at execution time to allow the agent to choose and schedule its plans to take advantage of potential commonality where possible. This increases the ability of the agent to act in a rational manner, where rational is loosely defined as the sensible behaviour exhibited by humans.