Generalised BDI Planning

Agent interpreters based on the Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions (BDI) model traditionally perform means-ends reasoning using plan libraries composed of reactive planning rules. However, the design of such rules often imposes a heavy knowledge engineering burden on a designer, and trades off flexibility for runtime efficiency. This use of planning rules originates from the limitations of planning technology at the time of the first BDI implementations. While these limitations have gradually been overcome by the integration of various types of planning into existing BDI theories, the corresponding interpreters remain fundamentally plan-library based. In this paper, we develop a novel BDI agent architecture driven by generalised planning as means-ends reasoning, in a radical departure from existing architectures. This architecture has two key properties. First, it more closely resembles the foundations of BDI logic and reasoning. Second, it offers substantial gains in efficiency in comparison with an architecture driven by classical planning.

Authors

• Felipe Meneguzzi
• Ramon Fraga Pereira University of Manchester
• Nir Oren University of Aberdeen

Keywords

• BDI
• Automated Planning
• Generalized Planning
• Autonomous Agents