Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Satisfying agent goals by executing different task semantics: HTN, OWL-S or plug one yourself

  • Published:
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a plan execution architecture which supports different task semantics. This way, each goal that is identified during the deliberation cycle of an agent can be satisfied through tasks defined in different semantics. The capability of supporting different task semantics provides two main advantages. The first advantage is the reuse of legacy artifacts within agent plans. The second advantage is simplifying the adaptation of an agent architecture to different standards of a business organization. In order to integrate various task semantics within a plan execution architecture, we have used a smoothly revised version of a previously articulated workflow model into which different task semantics would be reduced before execution. We have integrated hierarchical task network and OWL-S semantics into our plan execution architecture to test the strength of it in terms of support for executing different task semantics in an agent architecture. We think that such a plan execution architecture will contribute to the industrialization of agent architectures.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Alves, A., Arkin, A., Askary, S., Bloch, BCurbera, F., Goland, Y., Kartha, N., Dieter König, S., Mehta, V., Thatte, S., van der Rijn, D., Yendluri, P., & Yiu, A. (2006). Web services business process execution language version 2.0. OASIS Committee Draft.

  2. Ankolekar, A., Paolucci, M., & Sycara, K. P. (2005). Towards a formal verification of OWL-S process models. In International semantic web conference (pp. 37–51).

  3. Bellifemine, F., Poggi, A., & Rimassa, G. (1999). JADE—a FIPA-compliant agent framework. In Proceedings of the practical applications of intelligent agents.

  4. Burstein, M., Hobbs, J., Lassila, O., Mcdermott, D., Mcilraith, S., Narayanan, S., Paolucci, M., Parsia, B., Payne, T., Sirin, E., Srinivasan, N., & Sycara, K. (2004). OWL-S: Semantic markup for web services. Website, Nov 2004. http://www.w3.org/Submission/OWL-S/.

  5. Caire, G., Gotta, D., & Banzi, M. (2008). Wade: A software platform to develop mission critical applications exploiting agents and workflows. In AAMAS (industry track) (pp. 29–36).

  6. David, B., & Liu, C. K. (2006). Web services description language (WSDL) version 2.0 part 0: Primer. Candidate recommendation, W3C.

  7. Davis J., Du W., Shan M.-C. (1995) OpenPM: An enterprise process management system. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin 18(1): 27–32

    Google Scholar 

  8. Dikenelli, O. (2008). Seagent mas platform development environment. In AAMAS (demos) (pp. 1671–1672).

  9. Du, W., Davis, J., & Shan, M.-C., (1997). Flexible specification of workflow compensation scopes. In GROUP ’97: Proceedings of the international ACM SIGGROUP conference on supporting group work (pp. 309–316). New York, NY, USA: ACM.

  10. Ekinci, E. E., Tiryaki, A. M., Gürcan, Ö., & Dikenelli, O. (2007). A planner infrastructure for semantic web enabled agents. In OTM workshops (1) (pp. 95–104).

  11. Erol K., Hendler J., Nau D.S. (1994) Semantics for hierarchical task-network planning. Technical report. College Park, MD, USA

    Google Scholar 

  12. Evertsz, R., Fletcher, M., Jones, R., Jarvis, J., Brusey, J., & Dance, S. (2003). Implementing industrial multi-agent systems using jack. In PROMAS (pp. 18–48).

  13. Fowler M. (2002) Patterns of enterprise application architecture. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA

    Google Scholar 

  14. Graham J. R., Decker K., Mersic M. (2003) Decaf—a flexible multi agent system architecture. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems 7(1–2): 7–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  15. Grüninger M., Menzel C. (2003) The process specification language (psl) theory and applications. AI Magazine 24(3): 63–74

    Google Scholar 

  16. Haller, A., Cimpian, E., Mocan, A., Oren, E., & Bussler, C. (2005). WSMX—a semantic service-oriented architecture. In IEEE international conference on web services (ICWS ’05) (pp. 321–328). Los Alamitos, CA, USA: IEEE Computer Society.

  17. Hendler J. (2007) Where are all the intelligent agents?. IEEE Intelligent Systems 22(3): 2–3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Hinz, S., Schmidt, K., & Stahl, C. (2005). Transforming BPEL to petri nets. In W. van der Aalst, B. Benatallah, F. Casati & F. Curbera, Business process management, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Nancy, France (Vol. 3649, pp. 220–235). Heidelberg: Springer Berlin.

  19. Hollingsworth, D. (1995). Workflow management coalition the workflow reference model.

  20. Kiepuszewski, B., van der Aalst, W. M. P., ter Hofstede, A. H. M., & Barros, A. P. (2003). Workflow patterns. In Distributed and parallel databases (pp. 5–51).

  21. Klusch, M., & Gerber, A. (2006). Evaluation of service composition planning with OWLS-XPlan. In Proceedings of the 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, WI-IATW ’06 (pp. 117–120). Washington, DC: IEEE Computer Society.

  22. Lee-Urban, S. (2005). Tmk models to htns: Translating process models into hierarchical task networks.

  23. Lotem, A., Nau, D. S., & Hendler, J. A. (1999). Using planning graphs for solving htn planning problems. In Proceedings of AAAI ’99/ IAAI ’99 (pp. 534–540). Menlo Park, CA, USA: American Association for Artificial Intelligence.

  24. Moldt, D., & Ortmann, J. (2004). DaGen: A tool for automatic translation from DAML-S to high-level petri nets. In Fundamental approaches to software engineering: 7th International conference, FASE 2004 (pp. 209–213). Springer-Verlag.

  25. Myers K.L., Wilkins D.E. (1997) The act formalism—version 2.2. Technical report. Menlo Park, CA, SRI International Artificial Intelligence Center

    Google Scholar 

  26. Narayanan, S., & McIlraith, S. A. (2002). Simulation, verification and automated composition of web services. In WWW ’02: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web (pp. 77–88). New York, NY, USA: ACM.

  27. Padgham, L., Parkes, D. C., Müller, J., & Parsons, S. (Eds.) (2008). 7th International joint conference on autonomous agents and multiagent systems (AAMAS 2008, Vol. 2), Estoril, Portugal, May 12–16, 2008. IFAAMAS.

  28. Peer J. (2004) A PDDL based tool for automatic web service composition. In: Ohlbach H.J., Schaffert S. (eds) Principles and practice of semantic web reasoning Vol 3208 of Lecture notes in computer science. Springer, Berlin, pp 149–163

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  29. Peer, J. (2004). A PDDL based tool for automatic web service composition. In PPSWR (pp. 149–163).

  30. Pokahr, A., Braubach, L., & Lamersdorf, W. (2003). Jadex: Implementing a BDI-infrastructure for jade agents. EXP: in Search of Innovation (Special Issue on JADE), 3(3):76–85, 9

  31. Rao, A. S., & Georgeff, M. P. (1995). BDI agents: From theory to practice. In ICMAS (pp. 312–319).

  32. Rodríguez-Moreno M. D., Borrajo D., Cesta A., Oddi A. (2007) Integrating planning and scheduling in workflow domains. Expert Systems with Applications 33(2): 389–406

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Roman D., Keller U., Lausen H., de Bruijn J., Lara R., Stollberg M., Polleres A., Feier C., Bussler C., Fensel D. (2005) Web service modeling ontology. Applied Ontology 1: 77–106

    Google Scholar 

  34. Sadiq, W., & Orlowska, M. E. (1996). Modeling and verification of workflow graphs. In Technical Report No. 386. Department of Computer Science. The University of Queensland, Australia.

  35. Sadiq W., Orlowska M. E. (2000) Analyzing process models using graph reduction techniques. Information Systems 25(2): 117–134

    Article  Google Scholar 

  36. Sadiq, S., Orlowska, M., Sadiq, W., & Foulger, C. (2004). Data flow and validation in workflow modelling. In Proceedings of the 15th Australasian database conference, ADC ’04, Dunedin, New Zealand (Vol. 27, pp. 207–214). Darlinghurst, Australia: Australian Computer Society, Inc.

  37. Shapiro, R. (2002). A technical comparison of XPDL, BPML and BPEL4WS.

  38. Sirin E., Parsia B., Wu D., Hendler J. A., Nau D. S. (2004) HTN planning for web service composition using SHOP2. Journal of Web Semantics 1(4): 377–396

    Article  Google Scholar 

  39. Sycara K., Paolucci M., Ankolekar A., Srinivasan N. (2003) Automated discovery, interaction and composition of Semantic Web services. Web Semantics: Science, Services and Agents on the World Wide Web 1(1): 27–46

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Sycara K. P., Paolucci M., Van Velsen M., Giampapa J. A. (2003) The retsina mas infrastructure. Autonomous Agents and Multi-agent Systems 7(1–2): 29–48

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Sycara, K., Williamson, M., & Decker, K. (1996). Unified information and control flow in hierarchical task networks. In Working notes of the AAAI-96 workshop ‘theories of action, planning, and control’.

  42. Thiagarajan, R. K., Srivastava, A. K., Pujari, A. K., & Bulusu, V. K. (2002). BPML: A process modeling language for dynamic business models. In Proceedings of the fourth IEEE international workshop on advanced issues of E-Commerce and web-based information systems (WECWIS ’02, p. 239). Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society.

  43. WfMC. (2002). Workflow management coalition workflow standard: Workflow process definition interface—XML process definition language (XPDL)(wfmc-tc-1025). Technical report. Lighthouse Point (FL): Workflow Management Coalition.

  44. Wooldridge, M. (2002). An introduction to multiagent systems, chapter Practical reasoning agents (1st ed., pp. 65–86). Chichester: Wiley

  45. Wooldridge M. (2002) An introduction to multiagent systems (1st ed.). Wiley, Chichester

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computer Engineering Department, Ege University, Bornova, 35100, Izmir, Turkey

    Erdem Eser Ekinci, Tayfun Gökmen Halaç, Rıza Cenk Erdur, Ibrahim Cakirlar & Oguz Dikenelli

  2. Computer Engineering Department, Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey

    Övünç Çetin

Authors
  1. Erdem Eser Ekinci
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Tayfun Gökmen Halaç
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Rıza Cenk Erdur
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Övünç Çetin
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Ibrahim Cakirlar
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  6. Oguz Dikenelli
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Erdem Eser Ekinci.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Ekinci, E.E., Halaç, T.G., Erdur, R.C. et al. Satisfying agent goals by executing different task semantics: HTN, OWL-S or plug one yourself. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 26, 141–183 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-011-9185-2

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-011-9185-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation