Meta-Level Control in Multi-Agent Systems

Sophisticated agents operating in open environments must make complex real-time control decisions on scheduling and coordination of domain actions. These decisions are made in the context of limited resources and uncertainty about outcomes of actions. The question of how to sequence domain and control actions without consuming too many resources in the process, is the meta-level control problem for a resource-bounded rational agent. Our approach is to design and build a meta-level control framework with bounded computational overhead. This framework will support decisions on when to accept, delay or reject a new task, when it is appropriate to negotiate with another agent, whether to renegotiate when a negotiation task fails and how much effort to put into scheduling when reasoning about a new task