Monitoring Strategies for Embedded Agents: Experiments and Analysis

Abstract

Monitoring is an important activity for any embedded agent. To operate effectively, agents must gather information about their environment. The policy by which they do this is called a monitoring strategy. Our work has focused on classifying different types of monitoring strategies and understanding how strategies depend on features of the task and environment. We have discovered only a few general monitoring strategies, in particular periodic and interval reduction, and speculate that there are no more. The relative advantages and generality of each strategy will be discussed in detail. The wide applicability of interval reduction will be demonstrated both empirically and analytically. We conclude with a number of general laws that state when a strategy is most appropriate.