Decision-making and planning in agentic systems
Decision-making and planning are critical capabilities for intelligent agents to achieve their goals effectively in complex environments. Agents need to analyze various possible scenarios, evaluate outcomes, and select the action(s) that will lead to the most desirable outcome based on their preferences and constraints. Although utility functions (tools) and planning will be discussed in detail in later chapters, we will discuss these key components involved in agent decision-making at a high level in the following sections.
Utility function
A utility function quantifies an agent’s preferences by mapping outcomes to utility values, enabling the agent to compare and choose actions that maximize expected utility. Utility functions play a central role in decision-making for intelligent agents by providing a quantitative way to represent and reason about preferences over different outcomes or states of the world.
A utility...
