Agent Programming with Declarative Goals

A long and lasting problem in agent research has been to close the gap between agent logics and agent programming frameworks. The main reason for this problem of establishing a link between agent logics and agent programming frameworks is identified and explained by the fact that agent programming frameworks have hardly incorporated the concept of a declarative goal. Instead, such frameworks have focused mainly on plans or goals-to-do instead of the end goals to be realised which are also called goals-to-be. In this paper, the programming language GOAL is introduced which incorporates such declarative goals. The notion of a commitment strategy—one of the main theoretical insights due to agent logics, which explains the relation between beliefs and goals—is used to construct a computational semantics for GOAL. Finally, a proof theory for proving properties of GOAL agents is introduced. Thus, the main contribution of this paper, rather than the language GOAL itself, is that we offe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2000
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Koen V. Hindriks, Frank S. de Boer, Wiebe van der Hoek, John-Jules Ch. Meyer
• Keywords: Agent Logics, Agent Programming Frameworks, ATAL 2000, Declarative Goals, Intelligent Agents