Representing Long-Term and Interest BDI Goals

In BDI systems, agents are described using mentalistic notions such as beliefs and goals. According to the intentional stance this helps specifying and understanding complex behavior, because the system is made up of folk psychological concepts that humans naturally tend to use for explaining reasoning and behavior and therefore can easily grasp. To close the gap between the natural usage of the term goal and its operationalization within agent systems, BDI goals should reflect the typical characteristics of goals in the folk psychological sense, which is not completely the case for existing BDI goal representations. Hence, in this paper desirable features of BDI goals are presented and important aspects that are currently not covered in existing specifications are further elaborated. Concretely, the representation and processing of BDI goals is extended supporting also long-term and interest goals. The usefulness of the newly gained expressivity will be illustrated by an example application, implemented in the Jadex BDI agent system.

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