Probabilistic Planning in AgentSpeak using the POMDP framework.

AgentSpeak is a logic-based programming language, based on the Belief-Desire-Intention paradigm, suitable for building complex agent-based systems. To limit the computational complexity, agents in AgentSpeak rely on a plan library to reduce the planning problem to the much simpler problem of plan selection. However, such a plan library is often inadequate when an agent is situated in an uncertain environment. In this work, we propose the \(\text {AgentSpeak}^+\) framework, which extends AgentSpeak with a mechanism for probabilistic planning. The beliefs of an \(\text {AgentSpeak}^+\) agent are represented using epistemic states to allow an agent to reason about its uncertain observations and the uncertain effects of its actions. Each epistemic state consists of a POMDP, used to encode the agent’s knowledge of the environment, and its associated probability distribution (or belief state). In addition, the POMDP is used to select the optimal actions for achieving a given goal, even when faced with uncertainty.

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