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Goals in the context of BDI plan failure and planning

Published: 14 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

We develop a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) style agent-oriented programming language with special emphasis on the semantics of goals in the presence of the typical BDI failure handling present in many BDI systems and a novel account of hierarchical lookahead planning. The work builds incrementally on two existing languages and accommodates three type of goals: classical BDI-style event goals, declarative goals, and planning goals. We mainly focus on the dynamics of these type of goals and, in particular, on a kind of commitment scheme that brings the new language closer to the solid existing work in agent theory. To that end, we develop a semantics that recognises the usual hierarchical structure of active goals as well as their declarative aspects. In contrast with previous languages, the new language prevents an agent from blindly persisting with a (blocked) subsidiary goal when an alternative strategy for achieving a higher-level motivating goal exists. In addition, the new semantics ensures watchfulness by the agent to ensure that goals that succeed or are deemed impossible are immediately dropped, thus conforming to the requirements of basic rational commitment strategy. Finally, a mechanism for the proactive adoption of new goals, other than the mere reaction to events, and a formal account of interaction with the external environment are provided. We believe that the new language is an important step towards turning practical BDI programming languages more compatible with the established results in the area of agent theory.

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  • (2020)Agent programming in the cognitive eraAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-020-09453-y34:2Online publication date: 12-May-2020
  • (2018)A Formal Approach to Embedding First-Principles Planning in BDI Agent SystemsScalable Uncertainty Management10.1007/978-3-030-00461-3_23(333-347)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2018
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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    AAMAS '07: Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
    May 2007
    1585 pages
    ISBN:9788190426275
    DOI:10.1145/1329125
    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: 14 May 2007

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    • (2021)Probabilistic BDI Agents: Actions, Plans, and IntentionsSoftware Engineering and Formal Methods10.1007/978-3-030-92124-8_15(262-281)Online publication date: 3-Dec-2021
    • (2020)Agent programming in the cognitive eraAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-020-09453-y34:2Online publication date: 12-May-2020
    • (2018)A Formal Approach to Embedding First-Principles Planning in BDI Agent SystemsScalable Uncertainty Management10.1007/978-3-030-00461-3_23(333-347)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2018
    • (2017)Time and Space Reasoning for Ambient SystemsInternational Journal of Ambient Computing and Intelligence10.5555/3146610.31466138:3(38-57)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2017
    • (2017)Aborting, suspending, and resuming goals and plans in BDI agentsAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-015-9322-431:2(288-331)Online publication date: 1-Mar-2017
    • (2015)A BDI Agents Programming Language Based Fuzzy BeliefsProceedings of the 2015 7th International Conference on Intelligent Human-Machine Systems and Cybernetics - Volume 0110.1109/IHMSC.2015.170(334-336)Online publication date: 26-Aug-2015
    • (2015)Dealing with temporal failure in ambient systems: a dynamic revision of plansJournal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing10.1007/s12652-015-0266-y6:3(325-336)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2015
    • (2015)A Future for Agent ProgrammingRevised, Selected, and Invited Papers of the Third International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems - Volume 931810.1007/978-3-319-26184-3_1(3-17)Online publication date: 5-May-2015
    • (2014)MAINTENANCE GOALS IN INTELLIGENT AGENTSComputational Intelligence10.1111/coin.1200030:1(71-114)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2014
    • (2014)An operational semantics for the goal life-cycle in BDI agentsAutonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems10.1007/s10458-013-9238-928:4(682-719)Online publication date: 1-Jul-2014
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