Agent-oriented system development aims to simplify the construction of complex systems by introducing a natural abstraction layer on top of the object-oriented paradigm composed of autonomous interacting actors. One main advantage of the agent metaphor is that an agent can be described similar to the characteristics of the human mind consisting of several interrelated concepts which constitute the internal agent structure. General consensus exists that the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model is well suited for describing an agent's mental state. The desires (goals) of an agent represent its motivational stance and are the main source for the agent's actions. Therefore, the representation and handling of goals play a central role in goal-oriented requirements analysis and modelling techniques. Nevertheless, currently available BDI agent platforms mostly abstract from goals and do not represent them explicitly. This leads to a gap between design and implementation with respect to the available concepts. In this paper a generic representation of goal types, properties, and lifecycles is developed in consideration of existing goal-oriented requirements engineering and modelling techniques. The objective of this proposal is to bridge the gap between agent specification and implementation of goals and is backed by experiences gained from developing a generic agent framework.
Abstract. One aspect of rational behavior is that agents can pursue multiple goals in parallel. Current BDI theory and systems do not provide a theoretical or architectural framework for deciding how goals interact and how an agent can decide which goals to pursue. Instead, they assume for simplicity reasons that agents always pursue consistent goal sets. By omitting this important aspect of rationality, the problem of goal deliberation is shifted from the architecture to the agent programming level and needs to be handled by the agent developer in an error-prone ad-hoc manner. In this paper a goal deliberation strategy called Easy Deliberation is proposed allowing agent developers to specify the relationships between goals in an easy and intuitive manner. It is based on established concepts from goal modeling as can be found in agent methodologies like Tropos and requirements engineering techniques like KAOS. The Easy Deliberation strategy has been realized within the Jadex BDI reasoning engine and is further explained by an example application. To fortify the practical usefulness of the approach it is experimentally shown that the computational cost for deliberation is acceptable and only increases polynomially with the number of concurrent goals.
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