An operational semantics for a fragment of PRS

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is arguably the first implementation of the Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) approach to agent programming. PRS remains extremely influential, directly or indirectly inspiring the development of subsequent BDI agent programming languages. However, perhaps surprisingly given its centrality in the BDI paradigm, PRS lacks a formal operational semantics, making it difficult to determine its expressive power relative to other agent programming languages. This paper takes a first step towards closing this gap, by giving a formal semantics for a significant fragment of PRS. We prove key properties of the semantics relating to PRS-specific programming constructs, and show that even the fragment of PRS we consider is strictly more expressive than the plan constructs found in typical BDI languages

Agent programming in the cognitive era

It is claimed that, in the nascent ‘Cognitive Era’, intelligent systems will be trained using machine learning techniques rather than programmed by software developers. A contrary point of view argues that machine learning has limitations, and, taken in isolation, cannot form the basis of autonomous systems capable of intelligent behaviour in complex environments. In this paper, we explore the contributions that agent-oriented programming can make to the development of future intelligent systems. We briefly review the state of the art in agent programming, focussing particularly on BDI-based agent programming languages, and discuss previous work on integrating AI techniques (including machine learning) in agent-oriented programming. We argue that the unique strengths of BDI agent languages provide an ideal framework for integrating the wide range of AI capabilities necessary for progress towards the next-generation of intelligent systems. We identify a range of possible approaches to integrating AI into a BDI agent architecture. Some of these approaches, e.g., ‘AI as a service’, exploit immediate synergies between rapidly maturing AI techniques and agent programming, while others, e.g., ‘AI embedded into agents’ raise more fundamental research questions, and we sketch a programme of research directed towards identifying the most appropriate ways of integrating AI capabilities into agent programs

An operational semantics for a fragment of PRS

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is arguably the first implementation of the Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) approach to agent programming. PRS remains extremely influential, directly or indirectly inspiring the development of subsequent BDI agent programming languages. However, perhaps surprisingly given its centrality in the BDI paradigm, PRS lacks a formal operational semantics, making it difficult to determine its expressive power relative to other agent programming languages. This paper takes a first step towards closing this gap, by giving a formal semantics for a significant fragment of PRS. We prove key properties of the semantics relating to PRS-specific programming constructs, and show that even the fragment of PRS we consider is strictly more expressive than the plan constructs found in typical BDI languages