Tech Reports

ULCS-14-003

Actions with Durations and Failures in BDI Languages

Louise A. Dennis and Michael Fisher

Abstract

BDI programming languages provide a well developed route to implementing intelligent agents. However, as such agents are increasingly being used to work in, and interact with, real environments their treatment of external actions needs to be improved. In this paper we describe a mechanism for handling actions which have durations and failures. In particular we note that where an action has a duration it acquires two failure modes, one which requires an abort. We provide a formal semantics for this mechanism which is general enough to be used to add such actions to a wide range of BDI programming languages.

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