Metareasoning for Interleaved Planning and Execution

Abstract

Agents that plan and act in the real world must deal with the fact that time passes as they are planning. In the presence of tight deadlines, there may be insufficient time to complete the search for a plan before it is time to act. One can gain additional time to search by starting to act before a complete plan is found, incurring the risk of making incorrect action choices. This tradeoff between opportunity and risk, inherent in interleaving planning and execution, is a non-trivial metareasoning problem addressed in this paper.