Postulates for revising BDI structures

The process of rationally revising beliefs in the light of new information is a topic of great importance and long-standing interest in artificial intelligence. Moreover, significant progress has been made in understanding the philosophical, logical, and computational foundations of belief revision. However, very little research has been reported with respect to the revision of other mental states, most notably propositional attitudes such as desires and intentions. In this paper, we present a first attempt to formulate a general framework for understanding the revision of mental states. We develop an abstract belief-desire-intention model of agents, and introduce a notion of rationality for this model. We then present a series of formal postulates characterizing the processes of adding beliefs, desires, and intentions, updating costs and values, and removing beliefs, desires, and intentions. We also investigate the computational complexity of several problems involving the abstract model and comment on algorithms for revision. J. Grant Department of Mathematics, Towson University, Towson, MD 21252, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Kraus Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 52900, Israel S. Kraus Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA e-mail: [email protected] D. Perlis Department of Computer Science , University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742, USA e-mail: [email protected] M. Wooldridge (B) Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK e-mail: [email protected]