Modular/Hierarchical Construction Dichotomy
The organizing principle behind an agent's design will, of course, have a
strong impact on the form the agent's architecture finally takes. A software
engineering sort of approach suggests that the architecture should have a
relatively flat modular constructoin,
where each module is responsible for one particular action that may be shared by
a number of different tasks such as planning or learning. Alternatively, a more hierarchical approach, such as that
epoused by Newell , would analyze the different time scales on which the agent
must act, and build the architecture to cope with each of those levels.
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