Managing Goals and Resources in Dynamic Environments

A key problem for agents is responding in a timely and appropriate way to multiple, often conflicting goals in a complex, dynamic environment. In this paper we propose a novel goal processing architecture which allows an agent to arbitrate between multiple conflicting goals. Building on the teleo-reactive programming framework originally developed in robotics, we introduce the notion of a resource which represents a condition which must be true for the safe concurrent execution of a durative action. We briefly outline a goal arbitration architecture for teleo-reactive programs with resources which allows an agent to respond flexibly to multiple competing goals with conflicting resource requirements.