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Aborting, suspending, and resuming goals and plans in BDI agents

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Abstract

Intelligent agents designed to work in complex, dynamic environments such as e-commerce must respond robustly and flexibly to environmental and circumstantial changes, including the actions of other agents. An agent must have the capability to deliberate about appropriate courses of action, which may include reprioritising tasks—whether goals or associated plans—aborting or suspending tasks, or scheduling tasks in a particular order. In this article we study mechanisms to enable principled suspend, resuming, and aborting of goals and plans within a Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent architecture. We give a formal and combined operational semantics for these actions in an abstract agent language (CAN), thus providing a general mechanism that can be incorporated into several BDI-based agent platforms. The abilities enabled by our semantics provides an agent designer greater flexibility to direct agent operation, offering a generic means to manage the status of goals. We demonstrate the reasoning abilities enabled on a document workflow scenario.

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Notes

  1. CALO was a multi-year research project from which Apple, Inc.’s Siri evolved.

  2. If there is any difference between how to abort a goal that is externally performed versus how to abort one that is now known to be impossible, the abort-method can detect the circumstances and handle the situation as appropriate.

  3. As we note below, the agent checks in-conditions for falsehood on a regular basis, not just on resumption.

  4. According to the agent’s meta-decisions upon plan failure.

  5. If the necessary resources cannot be obtained, the resume-method can fail, upon which by default the agent drops the goal. More elegantly, since we assume that resume-methods should always succeed, the method can indicate to the agent’s meta-reasoning to abort the goal.

  6. An omitted c is equivalent to \({true}\).

  7. Where it is obvious that e is an event we will sometimes exclude the exclamation mark for readability.

  8. http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~jah/orpheus.

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Acknowledgments

This material is based upon work supported by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) under Contract No. FA8750-07-D-0185/0004. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of DARPA, or the Air Force Research Laboratory. The authors thank the JAAMAS reviewers, and the reviewers of the AAMAS 2007 and 2008 conferences at which preliminary parts of this work were presented. NYS thanks the Operations group at the Cambridge Judge Business School and the fellowship at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, where this work was performed.

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  1. David N. Morley

    Present address: Google, Inc., Mountain View, CA, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia

    James Harland & John Thangarajah

  2. SRI International, Menlo Park, CA, USA

    David N. Morley

  3. American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon

    Neil Yorke-Smith

  4. University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Neil Yorke-Smith

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Correspondence to Neil Yorke-Smith.

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Harland, J., Morley, D.N., Thangarajah, J. et al. Aborting, suspending, and resuming goals and plans in BDI agents. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 31, 288–331 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-015-9322-4

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