Logic-Based Hybrid Agents

Hybrid agents integrate different styles of reactive, deliberative, and cooperative problem solving in a modular fashion. They are the prime device of (Distributed) Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science for realising a broad spectrum of simultaneous functionalities in application domains such as Artificial Life, (Tele-) Robotics, Flexible Manufacturing, and Automated Transportation. This article presents a design methodology for hybrid agents which combines complementary approaches of Software Engineering and declarative Cognitive Robotics at five interconnected specification stages: Architecture, Computational Model, Theory, Inference, and Implementation. Although we give an introduction to the complete methodology of agent design in the first section, we concentrated on presenting a logic-based approach to describe deliberative processes within a hybrid agent architecture in the rest of the article. The interested reader can find the details of the overall framework as well as the proofs of the theorems in [JF01].

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