Hierarchical Planning in BDI Agent Programming Languages

Dr Sebastian Sardina

School of Computer Science and IT, RMIT University

Date and time: 11.30am-12.30pm, Friday 19th May, 2006

Venue: 10.08.04

Abstract:

BDI agent systems have emerged as one of the most widely used approaches to implementing intelligent behavior in complex dynamic domains, in addition to which they have a strong theoretical background. However, these systems either do not include any built-in capacity for “lookahead” type of planning or they do it only at the implementation level without any precise defined semantics. In some situations, the ability to plan ahead is clearly desirable or even mandatory for ensuring success. Also, a precise definition of how planning can be integrated into a BDI system is highly desirable. By building on the underlying similarities between BDI systems and Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planners, we present a formal semantics for a BDI agent programming language which cleanly incorporates HTN-style planning as a built-in feature. We argue that the resulting integrated agent programming language combines the advantages of both BDI agent systems and hierarchical offline planners.

This is joint work with Lavindra de Silva and Lin Padgham.

About the speaker:

Sebastian Sardina is a postdoctoral research fellow in the “Intelligent Agent Group” group at RMIT University since June 2005. He received his MS and PhD in Cognitive Robotics form the CS Department at the University of Toronto, Canada, and his BSc in Computer Science from the South National University in Argentina. His research interests include BDI and logic-based agents, planning, and reasoning about action and change.

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