GOAL as a Planning Formalism

It has been observed that there are interesting relations between planning and agent programming. This is not surprising as agent programming was partially motivated by the lack of planners that are able to operate in dynamic, complex environments. Vice versa it has also been observed, however, that agent programming languages typically lack planning capabilities. We show in this paper that the agent programming language Goal is not only a programming language but can actually be used as a planning formalism as well. This opens up many possibilities for various approaches to mix execution and planning in agent-oriented programming. Moreover, by using the recently introduced temporal Goal we are able to include not only the stratified axioms and ADL that are part of PDDL but also plan constraints.