Tutorial questions: topic 5
1. Think of a problem that you think would be well suited to collaborative distributed problem solving.
(a) Explain how you would decompose the problem into sub-tasks.
Search and rescue in a collapsed building. There is a controller agent and a range of different agents with different capabilities: small robots with heat sen- sors and infrared; small robots with cameras; large robots that are able to move debris and people; robots that are able to cut through debris. The controller agent has a map of the building and splits the overall task into smaller tasks to explore the different rooms of the building and rescue any casualties. For each of these sub-tasks (to search and rescue in one room), the controller will break it down into even smaller sub-tasks, that need to be performed sequentially:
• explore the room in order to: identify and locate any casualties; identify and locate any obstacles;
• remove any obstacles;
• rescue any casualties.
(b) Take one of the sub-tasks from the problem you have described for question 1a and assume that an agent is using the Contract Net protocol to identify a contractor for the sub-task. When making the task announcement, explain
i. what information the agent would ask to be included in bids and any constraints it would provide in its task announcement; and
ii. how it would evaluate the bids it receives.
Taking the sub-task: explore the room in order to: identify and locate any casualties; identify and locate any obstacles.
The agent would include the constraints that: bids must be received within 3 minutes; bidding agents must have either an infrared sensor, a heat sensor or a camera; and bidding agents must be less than 1m tall. It will ask the agents to include in their bids: details of the different sensing equipment they have, including the range of that equipment; the amount of battery the agent has remaining.
To evaluate the bids, the agent will ideally want a robot that has the most amount of sensors with the largest range, and with the most amount of battery. There may be trade-offs to be considered (e.g., the agent with the most battery may not have the best sensors). If it turns out that there is no single agent with a good set of sensors available, the controller may decide to allocate the task to multiple agents.
2. Give an example of a pair of actions that should be coordinated (this should be different from the examples in the core material). Explain why these actions should be coordinated.
I want to order some equipment for working at home. A precondition of this is that I have to have approval from my head of department. So I request my head of department to achieve this precondition. I need my head of department’s approval in order to achieve my goal of having equipment for working at home, and I cannot achieve this on my own. I have to request that my head of department performs this action.
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3. Give an example of prescriptive norm (different from the ones in the core material) and give three different reasons why an agent might choose to violate the norm. ⟨all-people, obliged, in-UK-shop, wear-face-mask, fine-100⟩
All people are obliged to wear a face mask when they’re in a shop in the UK, and if they get caught whiteout one then they will be fined £100.
Reasons they might violate this:
They don’t care if they get a fine.
They find wearing masks so uncomfortable that they’re willing to risk the fine.
They are exempted from the obligation because they have a medical condition. This means there is a permission norm as follows:
⟨all-people,permitted,have-medical-condition,not wear-face-mask, ⟩
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