Integrating real-time AI techniques in adaptive intelligent agents

Adaptive intelligent agents pursue multiple goals in dynamic, complex, uncertain environments. Illustrative applications include medical monitoring agents, autonomous robots, and animated actors. Real-time considerations include hard and soft deadlines, as well as more qualitative constraints. There are no bounded-time algorithms for such applications. Agents must construct goal-seeking behavior opportunistically out of component behaviors triggered at runtime. In contrast to conventional real-time systems, an agent's real-time effectiveness cannot be guaranteed by a single provably optimal technique. Instead, it must emerge from interactions among multiple heuristic techniques at architectur, cognition, and control levels.