Constraint-Based Agents

the long version

"Autonomous agents have become a vibrant research and development topic in recent years attracting activity and attention from various areas. The basic agent concept incorporates proactive autonomous units with goal-directed behavior and communication capabilities." "This book focuses on autonomous agents that can act in a goal-directed manner under real-time constraints and incomplete knowledge, being situated in a dynamic environment where resources may be restricted. To satisfy such comlex requirements, the author improves, combines, and applies results from areas like planning, constraint programming, and local search. The formal framework developed is evaluated by application to the field of computer games, which fit the problem context very well since most of them are played in real time and provide a highly interactive environment where environmental situations are changing rapidly."--Jacket.