Deliberation Scheduling for Problem Solving in Time-Constrained Environments

We are interested in the problem faced by an agent with limited compu tational capabilities embedded in a complex environment with other agents and processes not under its control Careful management of computational re sources is important for complex problem solving tasks in which the time spent in decision making a ects the quality of the responses generated by a system This paper describes an approach to designing systems that are capable of tak ing their own computational resources into consideration during planning and problem solving In particular we address the design of systems that manage their computational resources by using expectations about the performance of decision making procedures and preferences over the outcomes resulting from applying those procedures The approach we propose is deliberation scheduling explicit manipulation of expectations on the behavior of the environment and the bene ts of computation in order to determine how computational resources should be allocated