Goals in Agent Systems: A Unifying Framework

In the literature on agent systems, the proactive behavior of agents is often modeled in terms of goals that the agents pursue. We review a number of commonly-used existing goal types and propose a simple and general definition of goal, which unifies these goal types. We then give a formal and generic operationalization of goals by defining an abstract goal architecture, which describes the adoption, pursuit, and dropping of goals in a generic way. This operationalization is used to characterize the discussed goal types.

Authors

• M. Birna van Riemsdijk
• Mehdi Dastani Utrecht University
• Michael Winikoff Victoria University of Wellington

Keywords

• Agent Programming
• Goals
• Formal Semantics