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Hierarchical planning in BDI agent programming languages: a formal approach

Published: 08 May 2006 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    This paper provides a general mechanism and a solid theoretical basis for performing planning within Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. BDI agent systems have emerged as one of the most widely used approaches to implementing intelligent behaviour in complex dynamic domains, in addition to which they have a strong theoretical background. However, these systems either do not include any built-in capacity for "lookahead" type of planning or they do it only at the implementation level without any precise defined semantics. In some situations, the ability to plan ahead is clearly desirable or even mandatory for ensuring success. Also, a precise definition of how planning can be integrated into a BDI system is highly desirable. By building on the underlying similarities between BDI systems and Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planners, we present a formal semantics for a BDI agent programming language which cleanly incorporates HTN-style planning as a built-in feature. We argue that the resulting integrated agent programming language combines the advantages of both BDI agent systems and hierarchical offline planners.

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      AAMAS '06: Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
      May 2006
      1631 pages
      ISBN:1595933034
      DOI:10.1145/1160633
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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      Published: 08 May 2006

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      Author Tags

      1. BDI agent-oriented programming
      2. HTN planning

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      • (2021)Intention Progression using Quantitative Summary InformationProceedings of the 20th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems10.5555/3463952.3464115(1416-1424)Online publication date: 3-May-2021
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