Developing Intentional Systems with the PRACTIONIST Framework

Abstract

Abstract-Agent-based systems have become a very attractive approach for dealing with the complexity of modern software applications and have proved to be useful and successful in some industrial domains. However, engineering such systems is still a challenge due to the lack of effective tools and actual implementations of very interesting and fascinating theories and models. In this area the so-called intentional stance of systems can be very helpful to efficiently predict, explain, and define the behaviour of complex systems, without having to understand how they actually work, but explaining them in terms of some mental qualities or attitudes, rather than in terms of their physical or design stance.In this paper we present the PRACTIONIST framework, that supports the development of PRACTIcal reasONIng sySTems according to the BDI model of agency, which uses some mental attitudes such as beliefs, desires, and intentions to describe and specify the behaviour of system components. We adopt a goal-oriented approach and a clear separation between the deliberation and the means-ends reasoning, and consequently between the states of affairs to pursue and the way to do it. Moreover, PRACTIONIST allows developers to implement agents able to reason about their beliefs and the other agents' beliefs, expressed by modal logic formulas.

A Notation for Modeling Jason-Like BDI Agents

“…Other platforms as INGENIAS [4], JACK [5], Practionist [6] and Jason [7] adopt the BDI (Belief -Desire -Intention) paradigm. In the BDI model, agents continually monitor their environments and act to change them, based on the three mental attitudes of belief, desire and intention.…”

Towards More Flexible Bdi Agents

“…From the BDI agents' literature, it is worth noticing that there is no consensus about the definition of the concept of goal, and its relation with desire and intention. In our BDI architecture, we adopt the same point of view about goal as in (Morreale et al, 2007):…”