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Planning

Specifying decision algorithm

An agent may have several (sub)objectives it can act towards.

Eg: An navigation agent that wants to know the user’s destination may have to decide between asking for a nearby landmark, or for the street name or for a clarification of prior utterence.

Rule based vs utility computation

So, the agent needs some way of prioritizing various sub-objectives/ actions. It may do this using some rigid rules.

An alternative technique computes utilities - various actions are mapped to integers, and the action with the highest utility is executed. This can take into account probabilities. Eg: a navigation agent very sure of the street may want to assign low utility/ weight to the ‘ask street name’ action.

Some decision algorithms incorporate both techniques in a hierarchy.