Cover Page Autonomy as Decision-Making Control

Autonomy is an often cited but rarely agreed upon agent characteristic. Although no definition of agent autonomy is universally accepted, exploring the concept of autonomy is important because autonomy influences and is influenced by the degree of trust that agent designers and users place in their agents, the effectiveness of agent-based problem solving, and the organizational structure of agent-based systems. This paper reviews previous discussions of agent autonomy and presents a core definition synthesized from these discussions. This definition identifies “decision-making control” governing the determination of agent goals and tasks as the key dimension of agent autonomy. A representation of decision-making control is presented along with a metric that can be used to assess an agent’s degree of autonomy along this dimension for each of the goals the agent pursues. The representation allows the decisionmaking dimension of agent autonomy to be assessed and manipulated computationally. The development of this representation does not provide every answer, but it does shed some light on many issues surrounding agent autonomy. Submitted to The Seventh International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-2000) Special Track: Autonomy theory, dimensions, and regulation Boston, USA July 7-9, 2000 Contact Person: Yves Lespérance (CO-CHAIR) Email: [email protected] Department of Computer Science York University Tel: (+1 416) 736-5053 Room 126, Chemistry and Comp. Sc. Bldg. 4700 Keele St., Toronto, ON, Canada M3J 1P3.