Aborting tasks in BDI agents

Thangarajah, John; Harland, James; Morley, David N.; Yorke-Smith, Neil

doi:10.1145/1329125.1329133

Cited by 27 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Likewise, some form of 'failure handling' facility can be found in most mature BDI-based agent languages and platforms. For example, 2APL [9,10] provides plan revision rules which can be applied to revise plans whose executions have failed, JACK [11] and SPARK [12] provide failure methods and/or meta-procedures which are triggered when plan execution fails, and in [13,14] features are proposed for aborting and suspending tasks in the context of the CAN abstract agent programming language. Taken independently, such features can simplify the development of more robust agents.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atomic Intentions in Jason +

Kiss

Madden

Logan

2012

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. We consider interactions between atomic intentions and plan failures in the Jason BDI-based agent programming language. Atomic intentions allow the agent developer to control the execution of intentions in situations where a sequence of actions must be executed 'atomically' in order to ensure the success of a plan. However, while atomic intentions in Jason enforce mutual exclusion, they are not atomic operations in the sense understood in conventional programming or in databases, and failure of an atomic plan can leave the agent's belief and plan bases in an inconsistent state. In this paper we present a new approach to atomic intentions which provides a transactional 'all-or-nothing' semantics, and describe its implementation in a new version of Jason, Jason + . We argue that Jason + offers a more predictable semantics for atomic plans in the face of plan failure and can reduce the load on the agent developer by automating simple cases of failure handing, leading to the development of more robust agent programs.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Atomic Intentions in Jason +

Kiss

Madden

Logan

2012

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…This article combines and extends our initial report of semantics for aborting tasks [45] and semantics for suspending and resuming tasks [46]. This includes combining the different mechanisms from the two papers into one coherent semantics (which is not simply a conjunction of the two pieces of work), and developing a comprehensive prototype implementation of the complete semantics, demonstrating how an agent-based system can benefit from these capabilities.…”

Section: Contributionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Aborting, suspending, and resuming goals and plans in BDI agents

Harland

Morley

Thangarajah

et al. 2015

Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst

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Intelligent agents designed to work in complex, dynamic environments such as ecommerce must respond robustly and flexibly to environmental and circumstantial changes, including the actions of other agents. An agent must have the capability to deliberate about appropriate courses of action, which may include reprioritising tasks-whether goals or associated plans-aborting or suspending tasks, or scheduling tasks in a particular order. In this article we study mechanisms to enable principled suspend, resuming, and aborting of goals and plans within a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent architecture. We give a formal and combined operational semantics for these actions in an abstract agent language (CAN), thus providing a general mechanism that can be incorporated into several BDI-based agent platforms. The abilities enabled by our semantics provides an agent designer greater flexibility to direct agent operation, offering a generic means to manage the status of goals. We demonstrate the reasoning abilities enabled on a document workflow scenario.

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“…Finally, unlike in systems such as RAP [11], there is no explicit account of plan monitoring and recovery. The work in [14] on plan failure and abortion should be orthogonal to CAN-PLAN2. Further study of all the above issues is required.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Goals in the context of BDI plan failure and planning

Sardiña

Padgham

2007

Proceedings of the 6th International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

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We develop a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) style agent-oriented programming language with special emphasis on the semantics of goals in the presence of the typical BDI failure handling present in many BDI systems and a novel account of hierarchical lookahead planning. The work builds incrementally on two existing languages and accommodates three type of goals: classical BDI-style event goals, declarative goals, and planning goals. We mainly focus on the dynamics of these type of goals and, in particular, on a kind of commitment scheme that brings the new language closer to the solid existing work in agent theory. To that end, we develop a semantics that recognises the usual hierarchical structure of active goals as well as their declarative aspects. In contrast with previous languages, the new language prevents an agent from blindly persisting with a (blocked) subsidiary goal when an alternative strategy for achieving a higher-level motivating goal exists. In addition, the new semantics ensures watchfulness by the agent to ensure that goals that succeed or are deemed impossible are immediately dropped, thus conforming to the requirements of basic rational commitment strategy. Finally, a mechanism for the proactive adoption of new goals, other than the mere reaction to events, and a formal account of interaction with the external environment are provided. We believe that the new language is an important step towards turning practical BDI programming languages more compatible with the established results in the area of agent theory.

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Aborting tasks in BDI agents

Cited by 27 publications

References 18 publications

Atomic Intentions in Jason +

Atomic Intentions in Jason +

Aborting, suspending, and resuming goals and plans in BDI agents

Goals in the context of BDI plan failure and planning

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