Introspection on control-grounded capabilities. An agent inspired approach for control

Abstract

Introspective reasoning on physical agents dynamics will have an important impact on both individual and cooperative decisions in multi-agent environments. Introspection, a cognitive ability coming from the agent metaphor, allows agents to be aware of their capabilities to perform correctly the tasks proposed by other agents. Introspection, mainly on capabilities related to dynamics, provides agents a reliable reasoning for achieving sure commitments in cooperative systems. To that end, control-grounded capabilities guarantee an appropriate and explicit agent-oriented representation of the physical agents dynamics. This approach changes and improves the way how agents can coordinate with each other to perform the proposed tasks and how they manage their interactions and commitments in cooperative environments. The approach is tested on several scenarios where coordination is relevant, beneficial and necessary. Experimental results and conclusions emphasizing the advantages of introspection in the improvement of multi-agent performance in coordinated tasks and task allocation problems are presented.