Hierarchical planning about goals and commitments
Pankaj R. Telang, Felipe Rech Meneguzzi, Munindar P. Singh · 2013
We consider the problem of relating an agent’s internal state (its beliefs and goals) and its social state (its commitments to and from other agents) as a way to develop a compre-hensive account of decision making by agents in a multi-agent system. We model this problem in terms of hier-archical task networks (HTNs) and show how HTN plan-ning provides a natural representation and reasoning frame-work for goals and commitments. Our approach combines a domain-independent theory capturing the lifecycles of goals and commitments, generic patterns of reasoning, and do-main models. Specifically, our approach shows how each agent may take into account its capabilities, costs, and pref-erences as it plans its interactions (captured as operations on commitments) with other agents to attempt to achieve its goals.