Speed of Response:

Architectures that respond quickly are necessary for dynamic environments because the survival of the agent may depend on it reacting in a timely manner to events in the environment that happen without its control (e.g. getting out of the way of cars). This is especially important in unpredictable, dynamic environments.

To ensure a fast response speed the agent should constantly monitor its sensors to update its world-view (have an eager sensing policy). This policy affects the rest of the architecture. For example, many architectures which operate in think/execute cycles have slow response speeds because the thinking portion may not be guaranteed to finish before the world changes too much.

A problem with forcing all reactions to be quick is that the architecture may not have time to compute some long (but useful) steps, so its behavior might be to limited. This is a common argument against the very-reactive Subsumption Architecture.

A common solution to the speed/flexibility delemma is found in some modular architectures: have quick modules that may recognize and react to important environmental conditions, and have slower, more deliberative modules that are more precise, correct and/or general. Sometimes the slower modules control the reactive ones with a layered architecture (e.g. Atlantis). Another alternative is to run the modules in parallel (e.g. RALPH).

Examples of (potentially) quick-responding architectures are:

Examples of slower-responding architectures are:

Other Properties.

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