Social Minded Commitment Management

Over the past 30 years Artificial Intelligence has
fragmented from one broad subject into a cluster of narrow
but deep individual disciplines. During this time we have also
seen the development of increasingly complex software systems
for application domains such as robot control, mobile
computing, and expert system interfaces. Many of these designs
use elements from the branches of AI, but pay little
attention to the integration of these elements in an intelligent
way. This paper presents an approach to this intelligent integration
problem, based on a community of Intentional Agents.
Each of the agents within the community uses a Social Minded
Commitment Manager (SMCM) to allow it to reason and cooperate
in order to achieve goals when individual execution
has failed. An implementation of the SMCM that has been
developed for AgentFactory is presented, and its use then
motivated through the description of a robust, redundancy
tolerant robot control architecture named MARC.