Agent programming with temporally extended goals

ABSTRACT

In planning as well as in other areas, temporal logic has been used to specify so-called temporally extended goals. Temporally extended goals refer to desirable sequences of states instead of a set of desirable final states as the traditional notion of achievement goal does, and provide for more variety in the types of goals allowed. In this paper, we show how temporally extended goals can be integrated into the agent programming language Goal. The result is that Goal agents may now have both beliefs about the future as well as have temporally extended goals. We propose a new decision making mechanism that takes temporally extended goals into account, and investigate properties of this framework.

References

1. ]]F. Bacchus and F. Kabanza. Planning for temporally extended goals. pages 1215--1222, 1996.
2. ]]F. Bacchus and F. Kabanza. Using temporal logics to express search control knowledge for planning. Artificial Intelligence, 16:123--191, 2000.
3. ]]C. Baral, T. Eiter, M. Bjäreland and M. Nakamura. Maintenance goals of agents in a dynamic environment: Formulation and policy construction. Artificial Intelligence, 172(12--13):1429--1469, 2008.
4. ]]M. Bienvenu, C. Fritz, and S. A. McIlraith. Planning with qualitative temporal preferences. In KR'06, pages 134--144, 2006.
5. ]]L. Braubach, A. Pokahr, D. Moldt, and W. Lamersdorf. Goal representation for BDI agent systems. In ProMAS'04, volume 3346 of LNAI, pages 44--65. Springer, 2005.
6. ]]J. Broersen, F. Dignum, V. Dignum, and J.-J. C. Meyer. Designing a deontic logic of deadlines. In DEON'04, volume 3065 of LNCS, pages 43--56. Springer, 2004.
7. ]]P. R. Cohen and H. J. Levesque. Intention Is Choice with Commitment. Artificial Intelligence, 42:213--261, 1990.
8. ]]M. Dastani, M. B. van Riemsdijk, and J.-J. Ch. Meyer. Goal types in agent programming. In ECAI'06, volume 141 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pages 220--224. IOS Press, 2006.
9. ]]F. de Boer, K. V. Hindriks, W. van der Hoek, and J.-J. C. Meyer. A Verification Framework for Agent Programming with Declarative Goals. Journal of Applied Logic, 5(2):277--302, 2007.
10. ]]S. Duff, J. Harland, and J. Thangarajah. On proactivity and maintenance goals. In AAMAS'06, pages 1033--1040, Hakodate, 2006.
11. ]]E. Emerson. Temporal and Modal Mogic. In J. v. Leeuwen, editor, Handbook of Theoretical Computer Science, volume B. North-Holland Publishing Company, 1990.
12. ]]R. Fikes and N. Nilsson. STRIPS: A new approach to the application of theorem proving to problem solving. Artificial Intelligence, 2:189--208, 1971.
13. ]]K. V. Hindriks, F. S. de Boer, W. van der Hoek, and J.-J. C. Meyer. Agent Programming with Declarative Goals. In ATAL'00, pages 228--243, 2000.
14. ]]K. V. Hindriks and W. van der Hoek. Goal agents instantiate intention logic. In JELIA'08. 2003, 2008.
15. ]]K. V. Hindriks and B. van Riemsdijk. Satisfying maintenance goals. In DALT'07, volume 4897, 2008.
16. ]]K. V. Hindriks and B. van Riemsdijk. Using temporal logic to integrate goals and qualitative preferences into agent programming. In DALT'08, 2008.
17. ]]M. C. Mayer, C. Limongelli, A. Orlandini, and V. Poggioni. Linear temporal logic as an executable semantics for planning languages. Journal of Logic, Lang and Information, 16, 2007.
18. ]]G. D. Plotkin. A Structural Approach to Operational Semantics. Technical Report DAIMI FN-19, University of Aarhus, 1981.
19. ]]A. S. Rao and M. P. Georgeff. Intentions and Rational Commitment. Technical report, AAII, 1993.
20. ]]R. Reiter. The frame problem in the situation calculus: a simple solution (sometimes) and a completeness result for goal regression. In V. Lifschitz, editor, Artificial Intelligence and Mathematical Theory of Computation: Papers in honor of John McCarthy, pages 359--380. Academic Press, New York, 1991.
21. ]]S. Sardiña, L. de Silva, and L. Padgham. Hierarchical planning in BDI agent programming languages: a formal approach. In AAMAS'06, pages 1001--1008, 2006.
22. ]]H. Simon. Bounded rationality and organizational learning. Organization Science, 2(1):125--134, 1991.
23. ]]T. C. Son and E. Pontelli. Planning with preferences using logic programming. Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 6(5):559--607, 2006.
24. ]]J. Thangarajah, J. Harland, D. Morley, and N. Yorke-Smith. Suspending and resuming tasks in BDI agents. In AAMAS'08, pages 405--412, 2008.
25. ]]W. M. P. van der Aalst and M. Pesic. DecSerFlow: Towards a truly declarative service flow language. In WS-FM'06, volume 4184 of LNCS, pages 1--23. Springer, 2006.
26. ]]M. Winikoff, L. Padgham, J. Harland, and J. Thangarajah. Declarative and procedural goals in intelligent agent systems. In KR2002, Toulouse, 2002.

Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Distributed artificial intelligence

      • Intelligent agents

• Software and its engineering

  • Software notations and tools

    • Context specific languages