EBDI: an architecture for emotional agents

Most of the research on multiagent systems has focused on the development of rational utility-maximizing agents. However, research shows that emotions have a strong effect on peoples’ physical states, motivations, beliefs, and desires. In artificial intelligence research, emotions have begun to receive more attention, more prominently in human-robot/computer interaction with a focus on expressing or sensing emotions. A few recent projects are investigating commonsense reasoning, but research on applying emotions to agents’ decision making are still very limited. By introducing primary and secondary emotion into BDI architecture, we present a generic architecture for an emotional agent, EBDI, which can merge various emotion theories with an agent’s reasoning process. It implements practical reasoning techniques separately from the specific emotion mechanism. The separation allows us to plug in emotional models as needed or upgrade the agent’s reasoning engine independently.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Hong Jiang, José M. Vidal, Michael N. Huhns
• Keywords: Agent’s Reasoning Engine, Agent’s Reasoning Process, ATAL 2007, Rational Utility-maximizing Agents