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Capabilities
Planning
AIS does both complet and partial plans. The planning capabilities are
implemented by the dynamic control
architecture, specifically in the agenda manager submodule.
Planning takes into account both the interactions of the possible
actions (as in regular planning) and the urgency of the situations.
The types of plans generated will depend of the specific knowledge
programmed into the system. In Guardian the
plans are possible treatments for the patient.
Prediction
While the knowledge base in AIS can probably anticipate some of the
possible happenings, the system was designed more as reactive rather
than predictive. The dynamic control
architecture cycle is a simple plan-schedule-execute, where the
plans are meant to handle situations that the system thinks need
attention. Granted, the plans generated could include some predictive
factors, but, in general, they are meant as simple courses of actions
for handling past occurences. Our intuition is further confirmed by
their implementation of an asynchronous I/O
subsystem which can add new information from outside events to the
knowledge base at any time. This is information that the system does
not bother (or can not) predict.
We should mention, however, that all the plans (i.e. agendas)
generated by the system are meant to achieve some goal. The system is,
therefore, implicitly, predicting that the execution of its agenda
will have the desired effects. This might or might not be the case.
Meta-Reasoning
The AIS system does not provide for meta-reasoning techiniques.
However, its blackboard architecture does provide for the addition of
new cognitive skills. These could
include the ability to do meta-reasoning, but it is not clear whether
or not the basic blackboard architecture would have to be modified to
allow for such modules.
Reactivity
One of the main objectives of the AIS architecutre was to build a
system that could provide real-time respones to problems of different
urgency. Reactivity was implemented by allowing the planning,
scheduler and executor subsytems to be interruptable so that if
something important happens in the world it would be dealt with
promptly. The system determines which happennings are important by
using the filters in its dynamic I/O
channels. These filters can be changed by the system itself, while
it is working, so that it can focus on certain aspects of the
environment that it deems more important at the moment. The filters
can change the behavior of the system from, completly aware of every
event in the environment, to completly oblivious to the outside world.
Taskability
The AIS architecture does not, as far as we could tell, provide the
programmer the ability to give the system specific goals to be
achieved, while the system is running. Any goals the system is to
achive must be given prior to it starting its execution. After this
all the actions performed will be dictated by the agenda manager which
performs actions based solely on inut received from its perceptors and
knowledge it has stored.
Learning
AIS provides no learning mechanism.
NLP
AIS has not been used to provide a natural language facility, altough
it probably could be.
Interruptability
The AIS is a highly interruptable architecture, thanks to its satirfycing reasoning cycle. This cycle, in
fact, implements all the interrupts available to the system.
Basically, it is the samve cycle used in the dynamic control architecture but expanded
so that all the step in the cycle are interruptable and resumable.
Navigation/Manipulation
The AIS architecture is general enough to allow for any type of
navigation and manipulation subsystems. In the Guardian implementation the system does no
navigation, it simply manipulates the environment (e.g. by giving
advice or signalling that there is an emergency).
Any new type of manipulation or navigation system can be used with
AIS, as long as an appropiate dynamic I/O
channel is implemented.
Coherent Behavior
An AIS architecture would show coherent behavior, as exemplified by
the Guardian implementation, because the
actions are determined by the knowledge systems which has a particular
set of goals that it tries to satisfy.
Perception
The AIS architecture is general enough that any type of perception
substirem can be incorporated into it. This can be done as long as the
proper dynamic I/O channel is implemented.
Other
There are other capabilities that the AIS architecture stresses as
very important. The authors were very concerned with the systems
ability to satisfy some real-time constraints. AIS, therefore,
provides this capability. Not only that but the system claims to
degrade gracefully as the time boundaries become shorter. That is, the
quality of the solution it finds to a problem decreases as the inverse
(more or less) of the time it is allowed to think about it. AIS also
provides the capability of choosing
a focus of attention to which it can dedicate most of its resources.
Finally, the system claims to have speed-knowledge independence, the
response time of the system does not decrease as we add knowledge to it.