A Computationally Grounded Model of Emotional BDI-Agents

This paper extends BDI (belief, desire, and intention) logic by incorporating well-being emotion modalities (joy and distress) based on Ortony, Clore, and Collins’s (OCC) theory and obtain the emotional BDI logic called BDIE (belief, desire, intention and emotions) logic. We propose a new computational model of emotion triggers for BDI agents, called the interpreted observation-based BDIE system model (or BDIE model for short). The key point of this BDIE model is to express agent’s emotions, such as joy and distress, as a set of runs (computing paths), which is exactly a system in the interpreted system model, a well-known agent-model due to Halpern et al. We present a sound and complete proof system with respect to our BDIE model and specify a simplified auction scenario to illustrate the construction of the BDIE model and the specification of multi-agent systems involving agents’ emotional states using BDIE logic.