Sebastian Sardina
Lin Padgham
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.
- J. Ambros-Ingerson. IPEM: Integrated Planning, Execution, and Monitoring. PhD thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Essex, U.K., 1987.Google Scholar
- M. Bratman. Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press, 1987.Google Scholar
- P. Busetta, R. Rönnquist, A. Hodgson, and A. Lucas. JACK Intelligent Agents - Components for Intelligent Agents in Java, AgentLink News Letter, Agent Oriented Software Pty. Ltd., Melbourne, January 1999.Google Scholar
- B. J. Clement and E. H. Durfee. Theory for Coordinating Concurrent Hierarchical Planning Agents Using Summary Information. In Proc. of AAAI-99, pages 495--502, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. De Giacomo, Y. Lespérance, and H. Levesque. ConGolog, A Concurrent Programming Language Based on the Situation Calculus. Artificial Intelligence, 121(1--2):109--169, 2000. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. De Giacomo and H. Levesque. An Incremental Interpreter for High-Level Programs with Sensing. In H. Levesque and F. Pirri, editors, Logical Foundation for Cognitive Agents: contr. in honor of Ray Reiter, pages 86--102. Springer, 1999.Google Scholar
- L. P. de Silva and L. Padgham. A Comparison of BDI Based Real-Time Reasoning and HTN Based Planning. In Proc. of Australian Joint Conference on AI, pages 1167--1173, 2004. Google ScholarDigital Library
- L. P. de Silva and L. Padgham. Planning on Demand in BDI Systems. In Proc. of ICAPS-05 (Poster), 2005.Google Scholar
- D. Dennett. The Intentional Stance. MIT Press, 1987.Google Scholar
- O. Despouys and F. F. Ingrand. Propice-Plan: Toward a Unified Framework for Planning and Execution. In Proc. of European Conference on Planning, pages 278--293, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. Erol, J. Hendler, and D. S. Nau. HTN Planning: Complexity and Expressivity. In Proc. of AAAI-94, pages 1123--1228, 1994. Google ScholarDigital Library
- K. V. Hindriks, F. S. de Boer, W. van der Hoek, and J.-J. Ch. Meyer. Agent Programming in 3APL. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 2(4):357--401, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- F. F. Ingrand, M. P. Georgeff, and A. S. Rao. An Architecture for Real-Time Reasoning and System Control. IEEE Expert: Intelligent Systems and Their Applications, 7(6):34--44, 1992. Google ScholarDigital Library
- C. A. Knoblock. Planning, Executing, Sensing, and Replanning for Information Gathering. In Proc. of IJCAI-95, pages 1686--1693, 1995. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. S. Nau, Y. Cao, A. Lotem, and H. Muñoz-Avila. SHOP: Simple Hierarchical Ordered Planner. In Proc. of IJCAI-99, pages 968--973, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. S. Nau, H. Muñoz-Avila, Y. Cao, A. Lotem, and S. Mitchell. Total-Order Planning with Partially Ordered Subtasks. In Proc. of IJCAI-01, pages 425--430, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- P. Paolucci, O. Shehory, K. P. Sycara, K. P. Kalp, and A. Pannu. A Planning Component for RETSINA Agents. In Proc. of ATAL-99, pages 147--161, 1999. Google ScholarDigital Library
- G. Plotkin. A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics. Technical Report DAIMI-FN-19, Dept. of Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, Denmark, 1981.Google Scholar
- A. S. Rao. AgentSpeak(L): BDI Agents Speak Out in a Logical Computable Language. In W. V. Velde and J. W. Perram, editors, Agents Breaking Away (LNAI), volume 1038 of LNAI, pages 42--55. Springer-Verlag, 1996. Google ScholarDigital Library
- J. Thangarajah, L. Padgham, and M. Winikoff. Detecting & Exploiting Positive Goal Interaction in Intelligent Agents. In Proc. of AAMAS-03, pages 401--408, 2003. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. B. van Riemsdijk, M. Dastani, and J.-J. Ch. Meyer. Semantics of Declarative Goals in Agent Programming. In Proc. of AAMAS-05, pages 133--140, 2005. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. E. Wilkins and K. L. Myers. A Common Knowledge Representation for Plan Generation and Reactive Execution. Journal of Logic and Computation, 5(6):731--761, 1995.Google Scholar
- D. E. Wilkins and K. L. Myers. A Multiagent Planning Architecture. In Proc. of AIPS-98, pages 154--162, 1998.Google Scholar
- M. Winikoff, L. Padgham, J. Harland, and J. Thangarajah. Declarative & Procedural Goals in Intelligent Agent Systems. In Proc. of KR-02, pages 470--481, 2002.Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Hierarchical planning in BDI agent programming languages: a formal approach
Recommendations
A BDI agent programming language with failure handling, declarative goals, and planning
Agents are an important technology that have the potential to take over contemporary methods for analysing, designing, and implementing complex software. The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent paradigm has proven to be one of the major approaches to ...
BDI Agent Reasoning with Guidance from HTN Recipes
AAMAS '17: Proceedings of the 16th Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent SystemsBelief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent systems and Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning systems are two popular approaches to acting and planning, both of which are based on hierarchical and context-based expansion of subgoals. Over the past three ...
Planning with time limits in BDI agent programming languages
CATS '07: Proceedings of the thirteenth Australasian symposium on Theory of computing - Volume 65This paper provides a theoretical basis for performing time limited planning within Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents. The BDI agent architecture is recognised as one of the most popular architectures for developing agents for complex and dynamic ...
Comments