Abstract
The agent programming language GOAL is a high-level programming language to program rational agents that derive their choice of action from their beliefsand goals. The language provides the basic building blocks to design and implementrationalagents by meansofa setofprogramming constructs. These programming constructs allow and facilitate the manipulation of an agent’sbeliefs and goals and to structure its decision-making. GOAL agents are called rational because they satisfy a numberof basic rationality constraints and because they decide to perform actions to further their goals based uponareasoning scheme derived from practical reasoning. The programming concepts of belief and goal incorporated into GOAL provide the basis for this form of reasoning and are similarto their common sense counterparts used everyday to explain the actions that we perform. In addition, GOAL provides the means for agents to focus their attention on specic goals and to communicate at the knowledge level. This provides an intuitive basis for writing high-level agent programs. At the same time these concepts and programming constructs have a well-dened, formal semantics. The formal semantics provides the basis for deninga verication framework for GOAL for verifying and reasoning about GOAL agents whichis similar to some of the wellknownagent logics introduced in the literature.
Access provided by Autonomous University of Puebla. Download to read the full chapter text
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Baral, C.: Knowledge Representation, Reasoning and Declarative Problem Solving. Cambridge UniversityPres (2003)
Bellifemine, F., Caire, G., Greenwood, D. (eds.): Developing Multi-Agent Systems with JADE. No. 15 in Agent Technology. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. (2007)
de Boer, F., Hindriks, K., van der Hoek, W., Meyer, J.J.: A Verification Framework for Agent Programming with Declarative Goals. Journal of Applied Logic 5(2), 277–302 (2007)
Bordini, R.H., Hübner, J.F., Wooldridge, M.: Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. John Wiley & Sons (2007)
Bratman, M., Israel, D., Pollack, M.: Plansandresource-boundedpracticalreasoning. In: R. Cummins, J.L. Pollock(eds.) Philosophyand AI: Essays atthe Interface, pp. 1–22. The MIT Press (1991)
Bratman, M.E.: Intentions, Plans, and Practical Reasoning. Harvard University Press(1987)
Ceri, S., Gottlob, G., Tanca, L.: What you always wanted to know about datalog(andnever daredto ask). IEEE Trans.of KDE 1(1) (1989)
Chandy, K.M., Misra, J.: Parallel Program Design. Addison-Wesley(1988)
Clavel, M., Durán, F., Eker, S., Lincoln, P., Martí-Oliet, N., Meseguer, J., Quesada, J.F.: Maude: Specifcation and programming in rewriting logic. Theoretical Computer Science 285(2), 187–243 (2002)
Cohen, P.R.,Levesque, H.J.: Intention Is Choice with Commitment. Artifcial Intelligence 42, 213–261 (1990)
Cook, S., Liu, Y.: AComplete Axiomatization for Blocks World. Journal of Logicand Computation 13(4), 581–594 (2002)
Dastani, M.: 2APL: a practical agent programming language. Journal Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 16(3), 214–248 (2008)
Dastani, M., Hindriks, K.V., Novak, P., Tinnemeier, N.A.: Combining multiple knowledge representation technologies intoagent programming languages. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Theories(DALT’08) (2008).To appear
Davidson, D.: Actions, reasons and causes. In: Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford University Press (1980)
Davis, R., Shrobe, H.E., Szolovits, P.: What is a knowledge representation? AI 14(1), 17–33 (1993)
Dretske, F.: Explaining Behavior: Reasonsina World of Causes. The MIT Press (1995)
Ghallab, M., Nau, D., Traverso, P.: Automated Planning: Theory and Practice. Morgan Kaufmann (2004)
Gupta, N., Nau, D.S.: On the Complexity of Blocks-World Planning.Artifcial Intelligence 56(2-3), 223–254 (1992)
Hindriks, K.: Modules as policy-based intentions: Modular agent programming in goal. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems (Pro-MAS’07), vol. 4908 (2008)
Hindriks, K., vanderHoek, W.: GOAL agents instantiate intentionlogic.In: Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Logics in Artifcial Intelligence(JELIA’08), pp. 232–244 (2008)
Hindriks, K., Jonker, C., Pasman, W.: Exploring heuristic action selection in agent programming. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Programming Multi-Agent Systems (ProMAS’08) (2008)
Hindriks, K.V., de Boer,F.S., van der Hoek,W., Meyer, J.J.C.: Agent Programming with Declarative Goals. In: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Agent Theories Architectures and Languages, LNCS, vol. 1986, pp. 228–243 (2000)
Hindriks, K.V., van Riemsdijk, M.B.: Using temporal logic to integrate goals and qualitative preferences into agent programming. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on Declarative Agent Languages and Theories, vol. 5397, pp. 215–232 (2008)
Hindriks, K.V., van Riemsdijk, M.B.,van der Hoek, W.: Agent programming with temporally extended goals. In: Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems (2009)
vander Hoek, W., van Linder, B.,Meyer, J.J.: An Integrated Modal Approach to Rational Agents. In: M.Wooldridge(ed.) Foundations of Rational Agency, Applied Logic Series 14, pp. 133–168. Kluwer, Dordrecht (1999)
Jackson, P.: Introduction To Expert Systems,3rd edn. Addison-Wesley(1999)
Lifschitz, V.:On the semantics of strips. In: M. Georgeff, A. Lansky (eds.) Reasoning about Actions and Plans, pp. 1–9. MorganKaufman (1986)
McCarthy, J.: Programs with common sense. In: Proceedings of the Teddington Conference on the Mechanization of Thought Processes, pp. 75–91. Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, London (1959)
McCarthy, J.:Ascribing mental qualities to machines. Tech. rep., Stanford AILab, Stanford, CA (1979)
Meyer, J.J.C., vanderHoek, W.: Epistemic Logic for AI and Computer Science. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress (1995)
Newell, A.: The Knowledge Level. Artificial Intelligence 18(1), 87–127 (1982)
Pearl, J.:Probabilistic Reasoning in Intelligent Systems-Networks of Plausible Inference. Morgan Kaufmann (1988)
Plotkin, G.: A Structural Approachto Operational Semantics. Tech. Rep. DAIMI FN-19, University of Aarhus (1981)
Rao, A.S., Georgeff, M.P.: Intentions and Rational Commitment. Tech. Rep.8, Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute (1993)
van Riemsdijk, M.B., Dastani, M., Meyer, J.J.C.: Goals in conflict: semantic foundations of goals in agent programming. Autonomous Agents and Multi-AgentSystems (2008). Online
Russell, S., Norvig, P.: Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach,2nd edn. Prentice Hall (2003)
Schoppers, M.: Universal plans for reactive robots in unpredictable environments. In: Proceedings of the Tenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI’87) (1987)
Scowen, R.S.: Extended BNF -A generic base standard. http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/mgk25/iso-14977-paper.pdf (1996)
Shoham, Y.: Agent-oriented programming. Artificial Intelligence 60, 51–92 (1993)
Slaney, J., Thiébaux, S.: Blocks World revisited. Artificial Intelligence 125, 119–153 (2001)
Sterling, L., Shapiro, E.: The Art of Prolog, 2nd edn. MIT Press (1994)
http://www.swi-prolog.org/ (2008)
Acknowledgments
I would like to than keveryone whohas contributed to the development of GOAL, by helping to implement the language, developing the theoretical foundations, or contributing to extensionsof GOAL. The listof people who have been involved one way or the other in the GOAL story so far,all of which I would like to thank are: Lăacrăamioaria Aşstefăanoaei, FrankdeBoer, MehdiDastani,Wiebe van der Hoek, Catholijn Jonker, John-Jules Ch.Meyer, Peter Novak, M. Birna van Riemsdijk, Tijmen Roberti, Nick Tinnemeier, Wouter de Vries. Special thanks go to Paul Harrenstein, who suggestedthe acronym GOAL to me, and Wouter Pasman, who did most of the programming of the GOAL interpreter. I would also like to thank Hilko Derde for useful remarks that helped to improve this chapter.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2009 Springer-Verlag US
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Hindriks, K.V. (2009). Programming Rational Agents in GOAL. In: El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Dix, J., Dastani, M., Bordini, R. (eds) Multi-Agent Programming. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89299-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-89299-3_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-0-387-89298-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-387-89299-3
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)