Situation awareness as a form of meta-level control. This volume

Abstract. Situation awareness is an essential human cognitive capabil-ity in complex and dynamic task environments. This capability is con-cerned with the comprehension of perceived changes in the environment, and the repercussions of these changes on the choice of subsequent ac-tions. While situation awareness may appear to be applicable only to humans, some of its important features can be argued to be desirable qualities in agent-based systems. Software agents are resource-bounded computational entities; the need to put in place some form of control mechanism that manages the variety of agent’s internal activities and execution of domain actions becomes a requirement in almost any non-trivial application. Intention reconsideration, for instance, is an example of such a control mechanism that helps a BDI agent to determine when best to deliberate. Prior work has suggested building this control mecha-nism using decision theory. This paper describes an alternative approach, which is inspired by a well-received model of situation awareness in cog-nitive psychology. The premise of this paper is that there is a close link between perception and deliberation, which can be further exploited to improve intention reconsideration as a particular form of meta-level con-trol, and with implications for other forms of meta-level reasoning.