Robust execution of belief-desire-intention-based agent programs

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent systems are a popular approach to building intelligent agents for complex and dynamic domains. In the BDI approach, agents select plans to achieve their goals based on their beliefs. When BDI agents pursue multiple goals in parallel, the interleaving of steps in different plans to achieve goals may result in conflicts, e.g., where the execution of a step in one plan makes the execution of a step in another concurrently executing plan impossible. Conversely, plans may also interact positively with each other, e.g., where the execution of a step in one plan assists the execution of a step in other concurrently executing plans. To avoid negative interactions and exploit positive interactions, an intelligent agent should have the ability to reason about the interactions between its intended plans. We propose SAM, an approach to scheduling the progression of an agent’s intentions (intended plans) based on Monte-Carlo Tree Search and its variant Single-Player Monte-Carlo Tree Search. SAM is capable of selecting plans to achieve an agent’s goals and interleaving the execution steps in these plans in a domain-independent way. In addition, SAM also allows developers to customise how the agent’s goals should be achieved, and schedules the progression of the agent’s intentions in a way that best satisfies the requirements of a particular application. To illustrate the flexibility of SAM, we show how our approach can be configured to prioritise criteria relevant in a range of different scenarios. In each of these scenarios, we evaluate the performance of SAM and compare it with previous approaches to intention progression in both synthetic and real-world domains

Revising conflicting intention sets in BDI agents

Autonomous agents typically have several goals they are pursuing simultaneously. Even if the goals themselves are not necessarily inconsistent, choices made about how to pursue each of these goals may well result in a set of intentions which are conflicting. A rational autonomous agent should be able to reason about and modify its set of intentions to take account of such issues. This paper presents the semantics of some preferences regarding modified sets of intentions. We look at the possibility of simply deleting some intention(s) but more importantly we also look at the possibility of modifying intentions, such that the goals will still be achieved but in a different way

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

Agent-oriented Programming in Defence Domain

Research in distributed artificial intelligence has given rise to agent-oriented programming (AOP), an advanced software modelling paradigm. It has several benefits when compared with the existing development approaches, in particular, the ability to let agents represent high-level abstractions of active entities in a software system. Although still young and under evolution, this paradigm has already shown particular promise in a number of areas. This paper gives an overview of this paradigm, its benefits over the other conventional programming paradigms being used. It also proposes the decision support system model for the military domain.In the proposed system there are certain critical issues, which need to be focused upon. The existing conventional paradigms are inadequate to deal with these issues. This paper identifies these critical issues and discusses how AOP can address these issues

An Architectural Approach to Ensuring Consistency in Hierarchical Execution

Hierarchical task decomposition is a method used in many agent systems to organize agent knowledge. This work shows how the combination of a hierarchy and persistent assertions of knowledge can lead to difficulty in maintaining logical consistency in asserted knowledge. We explore the problematic consequences of persistent assumptions in the reasoning process and introduce novel potential solutions. Having implemented one of the possible solutions, Dynamic Hierarchical Justification, its effectiveness is demonstrated with an empirical analysis

Practical applications of multi-agent systems in electric power systems

The transformation of energy networks from passive to active systems requires the embedding of intelligence within the network. One suitable approach to integrating distributed intelligent systems is multi-agent systems technology, where components of functionality run as autonomous agents capable of interaction through messaging. This provides loose coupling between components that can benefit the complex systems envisioned for the smart grid. This paper reviews the key milestones of demonstrated agent systems in the power industry and considers which aspects of agent design must still be addressed for widespread application of agent technology to occur