Decision making by intelligent agents: logical argument, probabilistic inference and the maintenance of beliefs and acts.
John Fox, Peter McBurney · Non-Monotonic Reasoning · 2002
PROforma is a language and a technology for designing, implementing, testing and delivering software agents that can operate in dynamic and uncertain environments. The agent specification language is based on RL, a logic language that formalises reasoning, decisionmaking and plan execution using a combination of classical and non-classical logics. PROforma can be viewed as an object-oriented layer on top of RL that reifies the logic into a small set of “tasks”, notably decisions, plans and I/O tasks. The heart of decision-making in both PROforma and RL is a logical decision model based on the creation and evaluation of arguments for and against alternative beliefs and actions. In previous papers we have provided proof-theoretic and model-theoretic semantics for a Logic of Argument and suggested that argumentation is a general framework which subsumes many different forms of uncertain reasoning as special cases, including qualitative and non-monotonic logics; quantitative representations like probability and possibility, and “linguistic” representations of belief. Current implementations support a simple monotonic interpretation of argument based decision-making but do not address requirements for defeasibility or probabilistic belief revision. In this paper we discuss how argumentation can provide a framework for integrating these approaches into a unified agent model.