Aborting Tasks in BDI Agents

Thangarajah, J.; Harland, J.; Morley, D.; and Yorke-Smith, N. Aborting Tasks in BDI Agents. Proceedings of AAMAS'07, Honolulu, HI, May 2007.

Abstract: Intelligent agents that are intended to work in dynamic environments must be able to gracefully handle unsuccessful goals and plans. In addition, such agents should be able to make rational decisions about an appropriate course of action, which may include aborting a goal or plan, perhaps at the request of another agent, or as a result of the agent's own deliberations. In this paper we investigate the incorporation of aborts into a BDI-style architecture. We discuss some conditions under which aborting a goal or plan is appropriate, and how to determine the consequences of such a decision. We augment each plan with an optional abort-method, analogous to the failure method found in some agent programming languages. We provide an operational semantics for the execution cycle in the presence of aborts in the abstract agent language CAN, which enables us to specify a BDI-based execution model without limiting our attention to a particular agent system (such as JACK, Jadex, Jason, or SPARK). A key technical challenge we address is the presence of parallel execution threads and of sub-goals, which require the agent to ensure that the abort methods for each plan are carried out in an appropriate sequence.

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©2007 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in AAMAS'07 May 14-18, 2007 Honolulu, Hawai'i, USA.

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