Deliberation and its Role in the Formation of Intentions

Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achiev­ ing. In this paper, we present a branching­ time possible-worlds model for representing and reasoning about, beliefs, goals, inten­ tions, time, actions, probabilities, and pay­ offs. We compare this possible-worlds ap­ proach with the more traditional decision­ tree representation and provide a transfor­ mation from decision trees to possible worlds. Finally, we illustrate how an agent can per­ form deliberation using a decision-tree rep­ resentation and then use a possible-worlds model to form and reason about his inten­ tions.