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BDI Logics for BDI Architectures: Old Problems, New Perspectives

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Abstract

The mental attitudes of belief, desire, and intention play a central role in the design and implementation of autonomous agents. In 1987, Bratman proposed their integration into a belief–desire–intention (BDI) theory that was seminal in AI. Since then numerous approaches were built on the BDI paradigm, both practical (BDI architectures and BDI agents) and formal (BDI logics). The logical approaches that were most influential are due to Cohen and Levesque and to Rao and Georgeff. However, three fundamental problems remain up to now. First, the practical and the formal approaches evolved separately and neither fertilised the other. Second, only few formal approaches addressed some important issues such as the revision of intentions or the fundamentally paraconsistent nature of desires, and it seems fair to say that there is currently no consensical, comprehensive logical account of intentions. Finally, only few publications study the interaction between intention and other concepts that are naturally connected to intention, such as actions, planning, and the revision of beliefs and intentions. Our paper summarizes the state of the art, discusses the main open problems, and sketches how they can be addressed. We argue in particular that research on intention should be better connected to fields such as reasoning about actions, automated planning, and belief revision and update.

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Notes

  1. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bdi-agent-architecture. Viewed July 1st, 2016.

  2. The frame problem, one of the main and oldest problems in reasoning about actions, concerns the specification of the effects of actions [43]. The main challenge is to characterize these effects without explicitly specifying which conditions are not affected by executing actions.

  3. They use the term goals.

  4. Shoham mentioned that the belief could be any formula indexed by multiple time values, but does not elaborate this further. Such a generalization should come with more complex notation and new semantical and computational problems.

  5. The time parameter \(t{-}1\) is missing in [36].

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Acknowledgments

Our warmest thanks go to the reviewers of the KI Zeitschrift for their thorough reading and thoughtful comments. This work was partially supported by CSC (Chinese Scholarship Council) and by by ANR-11-LABX-0040-CIMI within the program ANR-11-IDEX-0002-02.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Toulouse, IRIT, Toulouse, France

    Andreas Herzig, Emiliano Lorini, Laurent Perrussel & Zhanhao Xiao

  2. Department of CS, WSU, Penrith, Australia

    Zhanhao Xiao

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  1. Andreas Herzig
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  2. Emiliano Lorini
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Correspondence to Andreas Herzig.

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Herzig, A., Lorini, E., Perrussel, L. et al. BDI Logics for BDI Architectures: Old Problems, New Perspectives. Künstl Intell 31, 73–83 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-016-0457-5

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