DELIBERATION SCHEDULING FOR PROBLEM-SOLVING IN TIME-CONSTRAINED ENVIRONMENTS

We are interested in the problem faced by an agent with limited comput ational capabilities, embedded in a complex environment with other age nts and processes not under its control. Careful management of computa tional resources is important for complex problem-solving tasks in whi ch the time spent in decision making affects the quality of the respon ses generated by a system. This paper describes an approach to designi ng systems that are capable of taking their own computational resource s into consideration during planning and problem solving. In particula r, we address the design of systems that manage their computational re sources by using expectations about the performance of decision-making procedures and preferences over the outcomes resulting from applying those procedures. Our approach is called deliberation scheduling. Deli beration scheduling involves the explicit allocation of computational resources to decision-making procedures based on the expected effect o f those allocations on the system's performance.