Abstract
In this paper, we consider the issue of designing agents that successfully balance the amount of time spent in reconsidering their intentions against the amount of time spent acting to achieve them. Following a brief review of the various ways in which this problem has previously been analysed, we motivate and introduce a simple formal model of agents, which is closely related to the well-known belief-desire-intention model. In this model, an agent is explicitly equipped with mechanisms for deliberation and action selection, as well as a meta-level control function, which allows the agent to choose between deliberation and action. Using the formal model, we define what it means for an agent to be optimal with respect to a task environment, and explore how various properties of an agent’s task environment can impose certain requirements on its deliberation and meta-level control components. We then show how the model can capture a number of interesting practical reasoning scenarios, and illustrate how our notion of meta-level control can easily be extended to encompass higherorder meta-level reasoning. We conclude with a discussion and pointers to future work.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
M. E. Bratman. Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reason. Harvard University Press: Cambridge, MA, 1987.
M. E. Bratman, D. J. Israel, and M. E. Pollack. Plans and resource-bounded practical reasoning. Computational Intelligence, 4:349–355, 1988.
P. R. Cohen and H. J. Levesque. Intention is choice with commitment. Artificial Intelligence, 42:213–261, 1990.
R. Fagin, J. Y. Halpern, Y. Moses, and M. Y. Vardi. Reasoning About Knowledge. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, 1995.
M. P. Georgeff and A. L. Lansky. Reactive reasoning and planning. In Proceedings of the Sixth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-87), pages 677–682, Seattle, WA, 1987.
D. Kinny and M. Georgeff. Commitment and effectiveness of situated agents. In Proceedings of the Twelfth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91), pages 82–88, Sydney, Australia, 1991.
J. P. Müller. The right agent (architecture) to do the right thing. In J. P. Müller, M. P. Singh, and A. S. Rao, editors, Intelligent Agents V—Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-98), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1999. In this volume.
D. Perlis. Meta in logic. In P. Maes and D. Nardi, editors, Meta-Level Architectures and Reflection, pages 37–49. Elsevier Science Publishers B.V.: Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 1988.
M. E. Pollack and M. Ringuette. Introducing the Tileworld: Experimentally evaluating agent architectures. In Proceedings of the Eighth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-90), pages 183–189, Boston, MA, 1990.
A. S. Rao and M. Georgeff. Decision procedures of BDI logics. Journal of Logic and Computation, 8(3):293–344, 1998.
S. Russell and P. Norvig. Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach. Prentice-Hall, 1995.
S. Russell and D. Subramanian. Provably bounded-optimal agents. Journal of AI Research, 2:575–609, 1995.
K. Schild. On the relationship between BDI logics and standard logics of concurrency. In J. P. Müller, M. P. Singh, and A. S. Rao, editors, Intelligent Agents V—Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages (ATAL-98), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1999. In this volume.
R. Turner. Truth and Modality for Knowledge Representation. Pitman Publishing: London, 1990.
M. Wooldridge and N. R. Jennings. Intelligent agents: Theory and practice. The Knowledge Engineering Review, 10(2):115–152, 1995.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Wooldridge, M., Parsons, S. (1999). Intention Reconsideration Reconsidered. In: Müller, J.P., Rao, A.S., Singh, M.P. (eds) Intelligent Agents V: Agents Theories, Architectures, and Languages. ATAL 1998. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1555. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49057-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-49057-4_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-65713-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-49057-9
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive