Intention Progression with Maintenance Goals

One of the key advantages of Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agents [7] is their ability to pursue multiple goals in parallel. When multiple goals are pursued at the same time, an agent has to decide which of its intentions should be progressed, and if the next step of the selected intention is a subgoal, the agent also has to decide which plan should be used. These two choices together form the intention progression problem [5]. Previous work on the intention progression problem is limited to scheduling achievement goals [8 13 , 16]. In addition to achieving certain states, in many applications agents must also maintain particular states of the environment, e.g., not running out of power, avoiding collisions, etc. Such goals are termed maintenance goals, as they specify a state of the environment an agent should maintain, and maintenance goals are supported by many BDI systems, including Jadex [6] and JAM [4]. Previous ap- proaches to [2] proactively reasoning about maintenance goals are based on summary-information [9]. However, the approach in [2] assumes that preventive measures to maintain a goal do not interact with the agent's other intentions.