An Alternative Approach for Reasoning about the Goal-Plan Tree Problem

Agents programmed in BDI-inspired languages have goals to achieve and a library of plans that can be used to achieve them, typically requiring further goals to be adopted. This is most naturally represented by a structure that has been called a Goal-Plan Tree. One of the uses of such structure is in agent deliberation (in particular, deciding whether to commit to achieving a certain goal or not). In previous work, a Petri net based approach for reasoning about goal-plan trees was defined. This paper presents a constraint-based approach to perform the same reasoning, which is then compared with the Petri net approach.