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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.

The availability of big amounts of dynamic data from several sources in mobility context and their real time integration can deliver a picture for emergency management in urban and extra-urban areas. A WebGIS portal is able to support the perception of all elements in current situation. However, in general, during the observation decision maker's attention capacity is not sufficient to address concerns due to information overload. A situational picture is necessary to go beyond the simple perception of the elements in the environment, supporting the overall comprehension of the current situation and providing predictions and decision support. In this paper we present MAGNIFIER, a WebGISbased intelligent system for emergency management, to entirely support the real-time situational awareness. Starting from the current situation and by using the practical reasoning model by Bratman, MAGNIFIER is able to suggest the appropriate course of actions to be executed to meet decision maker's goals.