• Journal of KIISE:Software and Applications
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• v.30 no.12
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• pp.1220-1227
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• 2003

To perform rational decision-making, autonomous agents need considerable computational resources. When other agents are present in the environment, these demands are even more severe. In these settings, it may be difficult for the agent to decide what to do in an acceptable time in multiagent situations that involve many agents. These problems motivate us to investigate ways in which the agents can be equipped with flexible decision-making procedures that enable them to function in a variety of situations in which decision-making time is important. The flexible decision-making methods explicitly consider a tradeoff between decision quality and computation time. Our framework limits resources used for agent deliberation and produces results that are not necessarily optimal, but provide autonomous agents with the best decision under time pressure. We validate our framework with experiments in a simulated anti-air defense domain. The experiments show that compiled rules reduce computation time while offering good performance.