Architectures :: Layered

The design philosophy underlying a layered architecture is to build simple agents capable of functioning in a dynamic environment. Agents capable of more complex behaviours are then created by incrementally integrating new behaviors in the form layers capable of interacting on their own with a dynamic environment and with other integrated layers. The prototypical architecture of this approach is the Subsumption architecture by (R.A. Brooks)

Layered architectures are designed to react to the environment at different levels of complexity. As the levels increase in complexity, so do the appropriate behaviors. This has led some researchers to incorporate the ability to plan at a specific level in the architecture. Erran Gat's Atlantis architecture is an example of this approach. The knowledge in layered architectures is distributed among the layers and reactive components which determine the behavior. Architectures which are not layered tend to keep model of the world in the form of a globalknowledge base