Toward quantified control for organizationally situated agents

Software agents are situated in an environment that they can sense and effect, flexible, having choices and responding to the environment, and autonomous, making choices independently. This dissertation focuses on the issue of choice in autonomous agents. We use the expression agent control to denote the choice process—the process of deciding which tasks to perform, when to perform them, and possibly with whom a given agent should cooperate to perform a given task. In this dissertation, we explore a detailed approach to local agent control called Design-to-Criteria Scheduling and then move agent control to a higher level of abstraction where agents reason about their larger organizational context and the motivations for performing particular tasks. This higher reasoning level is called the Motivational Quantities level.