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David Morley

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

4 papers
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4

AAMAS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Suspending and Resuming Tasks in Intelligent Agents

  • John Thangarajah
  • James Harland
  • David Morley
  • Neil Yorke-Smith

Intelligent agents designed to work in complex, dynamic environments must respond robustly and flexibly to environmental and circumstantial changes. An agent must be capable of deliberating about appropriate courses of action, which may include reprioritising goals, aborting particular tasks, or scheduling tasks in a particular order. This paper investigates the incorporation of a mechanism to suspend and reconsider tasks within a BDI-style architecture. Such an ability provides an agent designer greater flexibility to direct agent operation, and it offers a generic means for handling conflicts between tasks. We investigate conditions under which a goal or a plan may be suspended, the process for suspending it, and the appropriate behaviours upon resumption. We give an operational semantics for suspending tasks in terms of the abstract agent language CAN, thus providing a general mechanism that can be incorporated into any BDI-based agent programming language.

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AAMAS Conference 2007 Conference Paper

Aborting Tasks in BDI Agents

  • John Thangarajah
  • James Harland
  • David Morley
  • Neil Yorke-Smith

Intelligent agents that are intended to work in dynamic environments must be able to gracefully handle unsuccessful tasks and plans. In addition, such agents should be able to make rational decisions about an appropriate course of action, which may include aborting a task or plan, either as a result of the agent's own deliberations, or potentially at the request of another agent. In this paper we investigate the incorporation of aborts into a BDI-style architecture. We discuss some conditions under which aborting a task or plan is appropriate, and how to determine the consequences of such a decision. We augment each plan with an optional abort-method, analogous to the failure method found in some agent programming languages. We provide an operational semantics for the execution cycle in the presence of aborts in the abstract agent language CAN, which enables us to specify a BDI-based execution model without limiting our attention to a particular agent system (such as JACK, Jadex, Jason, or SPARK). A key technical challenge we address is the presence of parallel execution threads and of sub-tasks, which require the agent to ensure that the abort methods for each plan are carried out in an appropriate sequence.

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