Measuring Plan Coverage and Overlap for Agent Reasoning

In Belief Desire Intention (BDI) agent systems it is usual for goals to have a number of plans that are possible ways of achieving the goal, applicable in different situations, usually captured by a \emph{context condition}. In Agent Oriented Software Engineering it has been suggested that a designer should be conscious of whether a goal has \emph{complete coverage}, that is, is there some plan that is applicable for every situation. Similarly a designer should be conscious of \emph{overlap}, that is, for a given goal, are there situations where more than one plan could be applicable for achieving that goal. In this paper we further develop these notions in two ways, and then describe how they can be used both in agent reasoning and agent system development. Firstly, we replace the boolean value for basic coverage and overlap with numerical measures, and explain how these may be calculated. Secondly, we describe a measure that combines these basic measures, with the characteristics of the coverage/overlap in the goal-plan tree below a given goal. We then describe how these domain independent mesures can be used for both plan selection and intention selection, as well as for guidance in agent system design and development.

Authors

• John Thangarajah RMIT University
• Sebastian Sardina
• Lin Padgham RMIT University; Patrick Lambrix

Keywords

• Agent reasoning
• intention selection
• coverage
• overlap
• goals
• plans