Goal Generation with Ordered Beliefs

A rational agent adopts (or changes) its desires/goals when new information becomes available or its “desires” (e.g., tasks it is supposed to carry out) change. In conventional approaches on goal generation a desire is adopted if and only if all conditions leading to its generation are satisfied. The fact that certain beliefs might be differently relevant in the process of desire/goal generation is not considered. As a matter of fact, a belief could be crucial for adopting a given goal but less crucial for adopting another goal. Besides, a belief could be more influent than another in the generation of a particular goal. We propose an approach which takes into account the relevance of beliefs (more or less useful and more or less prejudicial) in the desire/goal generation process. More precisely, we propose a logical framework to represent changes in the mental state of an agent depending on the acquisition of new information and/or on the arising of new desires, by taking into account the fact that some beliefs may help the generation of a goal while others may prevent it. We compare this logical framework with one where relevance of beliefs is not accounted for, and we show that the novel framework favors the adoption of a broader set of goals, exhibiting a behavior which imitates more faithfully how goals are generated/adopted in real life.