Plan Selection for Probabilistic BDI Agents

Abstract

Abstract-When an agent wants to fulfill its desires about the world, the agent usually has multiple plans to choose from and these plans have different pre-conditions and additional effects in addition to achieving its goals. Therefore, for further reasoning and interaction with the world, a plan selection strategy (usually based on plan cost estimation) is mandatory for an autonomous agent. This demand becomes even more critical when uncertainty on the observation of the world is taken into account, since in this case, we consider not only the costs of different plans, but also their chances of success estimated according to the agent's beliefs. In addition, when multiple goals are considered together, different plans achieving the goals can be conflicting on their preconditions (contexts) or the required resources. Hence a plan selection strategy should be able to choose a subset of plans that fulfills the maximum number of goals while maintaining context consistency and resource-tolerance among the chosen plans. To address the above two issues, in this paper we first propose several principles that a plan selection strategy should satisfy, and then we present selection strategies that stem from the principles, depending on whether a plan cost is taken into account. In addition, we also show that our selection strategy can partially recover intention revision.

Accountability for Practical Reasoning Agents

“…Meta-cognitive. Multi-agent plan selection and revision have been explored through different approaches (e.g., [41,46,47]) indicating that practical reasoning must tackle meta-cognitive issues -agents not only build and follow plans, but they must also reconsider/revisit decisions and reason about the actual decision processes. Some questions arising are:…”

A Framework for Plan Library Evolution in BDI Agent Systems

“…For example, the work of [4] accommodates the hierarchical planning as an advanced plan selection engine to avoid potential troublesome execution sequences by looking ahead rather than simply selecting one applicable pre-defined plan. Another noticeable work [25] proposed a plan selection strategy that chooses a set of plans that fulfills the maximum number of goals while maintaining context consistency and resource-tolerance among the chosen plans. The argumentation based decision making framework also seems suitable to refine the deliberation reasoning of beliefs and desires of BDI agents in works of [26] and [27].…”

BDI Logics for BDI Architectures: Old Problems, New Perspectives

“…We already mentioned [50], but classical planning has also been considered [10,44]. All these contribution mix a declarative and an operational semantics (a similar view is also considered in [56]).…”