SR-APL: a model for a programming language for rational BDI agents with prioritized goals

1. MOTIVATION Recently, there has been much work on incorporating declarative goals in Belief-Desire-Intention Agent Programming Languages (e.g. [3]). In a BDI APL with declarative goals (APLwDG), declarative goals are used essentially for monitoring goal achievement and performing recovery when a plan has failed, performing rational deliberation, and reacting in a rational way to changes in goals that result from communication. While APLwDGs have evolved over the past few years, to keep them tractable and practical, they sacrifice some principles of rationality. In particular, while selecting plans to achieve a declarative goal, they ignore other concurrent intentions of the agent. As a consequence, the selected plans may be inconsistent with other intentions. Also, these APLwDGs typically rely on syntactic formalizations of declarative goals, whose properties are often not well understood.