Novelty Accommodating Multi-Agent Planning in High Fidelity Simulated Open World

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel AI agent framework capable of detecting, characterizing, and adapting to environmental novelties in complex, high-fidelity simulations involving multiple agents and continuous time-space, addressing limitations of prior approaches.

Contribution

The study introduces a general-purpose AI agent framework that handles novelties in noisy, complex environments with concurrent actions and external scheduling, demonstrated in realistic military simulations.

Findings

Effective novelty detection and adaptation in high-fidelity simulations

Improved coordination of concurrent actions under environmental changes

Robust performance in complex, stochastic scenarios

Abstract

Autonomous agents operating within real-world environments often rely on automated planners to ascertain optimal actions towards desired goals or the optimization of a specified objective function. Integral to these agents are common architectural components such as schedulers, tasked with determining the timing for executing planned actions, and execution engines, responsible for carrying out these scheduled actions while monitoring their outcomes. We address the significant challenge that arises when unexpected phenomena, termed \textit{novelties}, emerge within the environment, altering its fundamental characteristics, composition, and dynamics. This challenge is inherent in all deployed real-world applications and may manifest suddenly and without prior notice or explanation. The introduction of novelties into the environment can lead to inaccuracies within the planner's internal model, rendering previously generated plans obsolete. Recent research introduced agent design aimed at detecting and adapting to such novelties. However, these designs lack consideration for action scheduling in continuous time-space, coordination of concurrent actions by multiple agents, or memory-based novelty accommodation. Additionally, the application has been primarily demonstrated in lower fidelity environments. In our study, we propose a general purpose AI agent framework designed to detect, characterize, and adapt to novelties in highly noisy, complex, and stochastic environments that support concurrent actions and external scheduling. We showcase the efficacy of our agent through experimentation within a high-fidelity simulator for realistic military scenarios.