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Title: A Formal Metareasoning Model of Concurrent Planning and Execution
Agents that plan and act in the real world must deal with the fact that time passes as they are planning. When timing is tight, there may be insufficient time to complete the search for a plan before it is time to act. By commencing execution before search concludes, one gains time to search by making planning and execution concurrent. However, this incurs the risk of making incorrect action choices, especially if actions are irreversible. This tradeoff between opportunity and risk is the problem addressed in this paper. Our main contribution is to formally define this setting as an abstract metareasoning problem. We find that the abstract problem is intractable. However, we identify special cases that are solvable in polynomial time, develop greedy solution algorithms, and, through tests on instances derived from search problems, find several methods that achieve promising practical performance. This work lays the foundation for a principled time-aware executive that concurrently plans and executes.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2008594
PAR ID:
10451865
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Volume:
37
Issue:
10
ISSN:
2159-5399
Page Range / eLocation ID:
12427 to 12435
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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