A Situation Calculus Approach to Modeling and Programming Agents

The notion of computational agents has become very fashionable lately [24, 32]. Building such agents seems to be a good way of congenially providing services to users in networked computer systems. Typical applications are information retrieval over the internet, automation of common user activities, smart user interfaces, integration of heterogenous software tools, intelligent robotics, business and industrial process modeling, etc. The term “agent” is used in many different ways, so let us try to clarify what we mean by it. We take an agent to be any active entity whose behavior is usefully described through mental notions such as knowledge, goals, abilities, commitments, etc. (This is pretty much the standard usage in artificial intelligence, in contrast to the common view of agents as scripts that can execute on remote machines). Moreover, we will focus on the approach to building applications that involves designing a system as a collection of interacting agents.