Social Minded Commitment Management

Over the past 30 years Artificial Intelligence has fragmented from one broad subject into a cluster of narrow but deep individual disciplines. During this time we have also seen the development of increasingly complex software systems for application domains such as robot control, mobile computing, and expert system interfaces. Many of these designs use elements from the branches of AI, but pay little attention to the integration of these elements in an intelligent way. This paper presents an approach to this intelligent integration problem, based on a community of Intentional Agents. Each of the agents within the community uses a Social Minded Commitment Manager (SMCM) to allow it to reason and cooperate in order to achieve goals when individual execution has failed. An implementation of the SMCM that has been developed for AgentFactory is presented, and its use then motivated through the description of a robust, redundancy tolerant robot control architecture named MARC.