Debugging Agent Programs with Why? Questions

Debugging is hard, and debugging cognitive agent programs is particularly hard, since they involve concurrency, a dynamic environment, and a complex execution model that includes failure handling. Previous work by Ko & Myers has demonstrated that providing Alice and Java programmers with software that can answer “why? ” and “why not? ” questions can make a dramatic difference to debugging performance. This paper considers how to adapt this approach to cognitive agent programs, specifically AgentSpeak. It develops and formalises definitions for “why? ” and “why not? ” questions and associated answers, and illustrates their application using a scenario.

Authors

• Michael Winikoff Victoria University of Wellington

Keywords

• Programming languages and frameworks for agents and multi-agent systems
• Development techniques
• tools
• platforms