Agents in the real world must be capable of autonomous goal creation. One effect of this ability is that the agent may gener?ate a substantial number of goals, but only a small number of these will be relevant at any one time. Therefore, there is a need for some heuristic mechanism to control an agent's reasoning attention. Such a mechanism is presented in this paper; alarms. Alarms serve to focus the attention of the agent on the most salient goals, and thereby avoid unnecessary reasoning. In this way, a resource-bounded agent can employ modem planning methods to effectiveness
