Evolution Prospection

This work concerns the problem of modelling evolving prospective agent systems. Inasmuch a prospective agent [1] looks ahead a number of steps into the future, it is confronted with the problem of having several different possible courses of evolution, and therefore needs to be able to prefer amongst them to decide the best to follow as seen from its present state. First it needs a priori preferences for the generation of likely courses of evolution. Subsequently, this being one main contribution of this paper, based on the historical information as well as on a mixture of quantitative and qualitative a posteriori evaluation of its possible evolutions, we equip our agent with so-called evolution-level preferences mechanism, involving three distinct types of commitment. In addition, one other main contribution, to enable such a prospective agent to evolve, we provide a way for modelling its evolving knowledge base, including environment and course of evolution triggering of all active goals (desires), context-sensitive preferences and integrity constraints. We exhibit several examples to illustrate the proposed concepts.