Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Agents in the real world must be capable of autonomous goal creation. One effect of this ability is that the agent may gener?ate a substantial number of goals, but only a small number of these will be relevant at any one time. Therefore, there is a need for some heuristic mechanism to control an agent's reasoning attention. Such a mechanism is presented in this paper; alarms. Alarms serve to focus the attention of the agent on the most salient goals, and thereby avoid unnecessary reasoning. In this way, a resource-bounded agent can employ modem planning methods to effectiveness