ABSTRACT
Focusing attention—that is, deciding what to work on—is an important and often difficult task for an adaptive reasoner. An agent will in general have more goals than it can hope to work on at any given moment. Resource limitations bound the number that can be simultaneously pursued. In an AUV, for example, the bandwidth of an acoustic communication channel may prevent the agent from carrying on as many simultaneous conversations as it would like. Constraints between goals also bound this number, for example, ordering constraints that tend to serialize the pursuit of goals. The agent is also limited by bounded rationality (Simon, 1957, cited in Fox, 1981)—it may lack the cognitive resources necessary to simultaneously pursue all its goals.
