Specifying the Merging of Desires into Goals in the Context of Beliefs

Rao and Georgeff’s BDI_ctl logic is a popular specification and verification language for cognitive agent systems, in which desires and goals are unified into a single motivational attitude. In this paper desires and goals are distinguished to specify the merging of desires into goals, an important process in several agent systems such as Broersen et al.’s BOID system. We therefore introduce a BDGI_ctl logic. Moreover, we distinguish the merging of conflicting motivational attitudes such as desires into goals from the merging of conflicting informational attitudes such as knowledge bases or belief sources into beliefs, for which we use recent results in variants of belief revision known as semi-revision, fusion or merging. In particular, whereas belief merging is a generalization of revision, desire merging is a generalization of a kind of contraction known as (severe) withdrawal.