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Operational Behaviour for Executing, Suspending, and Aborting Goals in BDI Agent Systems

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Book cover Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies VIII (DALT 2010)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 6619))

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Abstract

Deliberation over and management of goals is a key aspect of an agent’s architecture. We consider the various types of goals studied in the literature, including performance, achievement, and maintenance goals. Focusing on BDI agents, we develop a detailed description of goal states (such as whether goals have been suspended or not) and a comprehensive suite of operations that may be applied to goals (including dropping, aborting, suspending and resuming them). We show how to specify an operational semantics corresponding to this detailed description in an abstract agent language (Can). The three key contributions of our generic framework for goal states and transitions are (1) to encompass both goals of accomplishment and rich goals of monitoring, (2) to provide the first specification of abort and suspend for all the common goal types, and (3) to account for plan execution as well as the dynamics of sub-goaling.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    John Thangarajah & James Harland

  2. SRI International, Menlo Park, USA

    David Morley & Neil Yorke-Smith

  3. American University of Beirut, Lebanon

    Neil Yorke-Smith

Authors
  1. John Thangarajah
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  2. James Harland
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  3. David Morley
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  4. Neil Yorke-Smith
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna a Cesena, via Venezia 52, 47023, Cesena, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

  2. School of Computer Science and Information Technology, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    Sebastian Sardina

  3. Department of Computing Science, University of Aberdeen, AB24 3UE, Aberdeen, UK

    Wamberto Vasconcelos

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Thangarajah, J., Harland, J., Morley, D., Yorke-Smith, N. (2011). Operational Behaviour for Executing, Suspending, and Aborting Goals in BDI Agent Systems. In: Omicini, A., Sardina, S., Vasconcelos, W. (eds) Declarative Agent Languages and Technologies VIII. DALT 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6619. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20715-0_1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20715-0_1

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20714-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20715-0

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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