Extending agent languages for autonomy
Felipe Rech Meneguzzi · 2008
BDI agent languages provide a useful abstraction for com-plex systems comprised of interactive autonomous entities, but they have been used mostly in the context of single agents with a static plan library of behaviours invoked reac-tively. These languages provide a theoretically sound basis for agent design but are very limited in providing direct sup-port for autonomy and societal cooperation needed for large scale systems. Some techniques for autonomy and coopera-tion have been explored in the past in ad hoc implementa-tions, but not incorporated in any agent language. In order to address these shortcomings we extend the well known AgentSpeak(L) BDI agent language to include behaviour generation through planning, declarative goals and moti-vated goal adoption. We also develop a language-specific multiagent cooperation scheme and, to address potential problems arising from autonomy in a multiagent system, we extend our agents with a mechanism for norm processing leveraging existing theoretical work. These extensions al-low for greater autonomy in the resulting systems, enabling them to synthesise new behaviours at runtime and to coop-erate in non-scripted patterns. 1.