Intentional Agents and Goal Formation

This paper is about a fundamental aspect of intentional action, namely the process of goal formation. Existing formal theories of agents are found essentially inadequate to account for the formation of new goals and intentions of the agent; on the other hand, the formation of new goals is often viewed as an essential feature of autonomous agents. Autonomous goal-formation is described thanks to the interplay between existing (built-in) goals and new beliefs. A general rule for goal formation is then formally expressed in terms of a language (FORM) developed for treating properties of autonomous agents. More specific applications of this rule to the social domain are examined, in particular to conformity and help.

[1]  Michael P. Georgeff,et al.  Commitment and Effectiveness of Situated Agents , 1991, IJCAI.

[2]  R. Conte,et al.  Cognitive and social action , 1995 .

[3]  Michael E. Bratman,et al.  What is intention , 1987 .

[4]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  Commitments: From Individual Intentions to Groups and Organizations , 1995, ICMAS.

[5]  Michael Wooldridge,et al.  A Formal Specification of dMARS , 1997, ATAL.

[6]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  A Model-Theoretic Approach to the Verification of Situated Reasoning Systems , 1993, IJCAI.

[7]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  The Semantics of Intention Maintenance for Rational Agents , 1995, IJCAI.

[8]  Cristiano Castelfranchi,et al.  Reasons: belief support and goal dynamics , 1996 .

[9]  Philip R. Cohen,et al.  Intentions in Communication , 1992, Language.

[10]  John-Jules Ch. Meyer,et al.  A different approach to deontic logic: deontic logic viewed as a variant of dynamic logic , 1987, Notre Dame J. Formal Log..

[11]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Social Interactions of Autonomous Agents: Private and Global Views on Communication , 1997, ModelAge Workshop.

[12]  Klaus Fischer,et al.  A Layered Agent Calculus with Cocurrent, Continuous Processes , 1997, ATAL.

[13]  Nicholas R. Jennings,et al.  Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages: A Survey , 1995, ECAI Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages.

[14]  Hector J. Levesque,et al.  Intention is Choice with Commitment , 1990, Artif. Intell..

[15]  Frank Dignum,et al.  Implementation of a Cooperative Agent Architecture Based on the Language-Action Perspective , 1997, ATAL.

[16]  Anand S. Rao,et al.  Modeling Rational Agents within a BDI-Architecture , 1997, KR.