Quantifying the Progress of Goals in Intelligent Agents

Quantifying the Progress of Goals in Intelligent Agents

Harland, James (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University)
Thangarajah, John (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University)
Yorke-Smith, N. (TU Delft Algorithmics; American University of Beirut)

2022

Deliberation over goals is a fundamental feature of intelligent agent systems. In this article we provide pragmatic but principled mechanisms for quantifying the level of completeness of goals in a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent. Our approach leverages previous work on resource and effects summarization which we extend by accommodating both dynamic resource summaries and goal effects, while also allowing a non-binary quantification of goal completeness. We treat both goals of accomplishment (achievement goals) and goals of monitoring (maintenance goals). We reconcile such practical computation of progress estimates of goals of both types with an earlier theoretical perspective on rnBDI goal completeness, and thus extend the theoretical framework to include maintenance goals. Our computational mechanisms have been implemented in the abstract agent language CAN. We also provide a case study in an autonomous rover domain.

agent-based systems
maintenance goals
Belief-Desire-Intention
goal reasoning

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b8e7915f-d824-4b7a-bd09-7e5397dc9053

https://doi.org/10.1504/IJAOSE.2022.122640

2022-10-31

1746-1375

International journal of agent-oriented software engineering, 7 (2), 108-151

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 James Harland, John Thangarajah, N. Yorke-Smith