Programming Mental State Abduction

Many multi-agent system applications involve software agents that reason about the behavior of other agents with which they interact in cooperation or competition. In order to design and develop those systems, the employed programming languages should provide tools to facilitate the implementation of agents that can perform such reasoning. This paper focuses on BDI-based programming languages and proposes a nonmonotonic reasoning mechanism that can be incorporated into agents, allowing them to reason about observed behavior to infer others' beliefs or goals. In particular, it is suggested that the behavior-generating rules of agents are translated into a nonmonotonic logic programming framework. A formal analysis of the presented approach is provided and it is shown that it has desirable properties.

Authors

• Michal Sindlar
• Mehdi Dastani Utrecht University
• John-Jules Ch. Meyer

Keywords

• Modeling other agents and self
• Logic-based approaches and methods
• Reasoning (single and multiagent)