Abstract
We consider interactions between atomic intentions and plan failures in the Jason BDI-based agent programming language. Atomic intentions allow the agent developer to control the execution of intentions in situations where a sequence of actions must be executed ‘atomically’ in order to ensure the success of a plan. However, while atomic intentions in Jason enforce mutual exclusion, they are not atomic operations in the sense understood in conventional programming or in databases, and failure of an atomic plan can leave the agent’s belief and plan bases in an inconsistent state. In this paper we present a new approach to atomic intentions which provides a transactional ‘all-or-nothing’ semantics, and describe its implementation in a new version of Jason, Jason + . We argue that Jason + offers a more predictable semantics for atomic plans in the face of plan failure and can reduce the load on the agent developer by automating simple cases of failure handing, leading to the development of more robust agent programs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Bordini, R.H., Hübner, J.F., Wooldridge, M.: Programming Multi-Agent Systems in AgentSpeak using Jason. John Wiley & Sons Ltd. (2007)
Rao, A.S.: AgentSpeak(L): BDI Agents Speak Out in a Logical Computable Language. In: Perram, J., Van de Velde, W. (eds.) MAAMAW 1996. LNCS, vol. 1038, pp. 42–55. Springer, Heidelberg (1996)
Bordini, R.H., Hübner, J.F., Vieira, R.: Jason and the Golden Fleece of Agent-Oriented Programming. In: Bordini, R.H., Dastani, M., Dix, J., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A. (eds.) Multi-Agent Programming: Languages, Platforms and Applications. Springer, Heidelberg (2005)
Madden, N., Logan, B.: Modularity and Compositionality in Jason. In: Braubach, L., Briot, J.-P., Thangarajah, J. (eds.) ProMAS 2009. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 5919, pp. 237–253. Springer, Heidelberg (2010)
Bordini, R., Bazzan, A.L.C., de Jannone, R.O., Basso, D.M., Vicari, R.M., Lesser, V.R.: AgentSpeak(XL): efficient intention selection in BDI agents via decision-theoretic task scheduling. In: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2002), pp. 1294–1302. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Ancona, D., Mascardi, V.: Coo-BDI: Extending the BDI Model with Cooperativity. In: Leite, J., Omicini, A., Sterling, L., Torroni, P. (eds.) DALT 2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2990, pp. 109–134. Springer, Heidelberg (2004), doi:10.1007/978-3-540-25932-9_7
Ancona, D., Mascardi, V., Hubner, J.F., Bordini, R.H.: Coo-AgentSpeak: Cooperation in AgentSpeak through plan exchange. In: Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2004), pp. 696–705. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2004)
Bray, T., Hollander, D., Layman, A., Tobin, R.: Namespaces in XML 1.0, 2nd edn. Technical report, W3C (2006), http://www.w3.org/TR/2006/REC-xml-names-20060816
Dastani, M.: 2APL: a practical agent programming language. Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems 16, 214–248 (2008)
Dastani, M., Meyer, J.J.C.: A Practical Agent Programming Language. In: Dastani, M.M., El Fallah Seghrouchni, A., Ricci, A., Winikoff, M. (eds.) ProMAS 2007. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 4908, pp. 107–123. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)
Busetta, P., Rönnquist, R., Hodgson, A., Lucas, A.: JACK intelligent agents - components for intelligent agents in Java. AgentLink Newsletter (2), 2–5 (1992)
Morley, D., Myers, K.: The SPARK agent framework. In: Proceedings of the Third International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2004), pp. 714–721. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2004)
Thangarajah, J., Harland, J., Morley, D., Yorke-Smith, N.: Aborting tasks in BDI agents. In: Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS 2007), Honolulu, HI, pp. 8–15 (May 2007)
Thangarajah, J., Harland, J., Morley, D., Yorke-Smith, N.: Suspending and resuming tasks in BDI agents. In: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi Agent Systems (AAMAS 2008), Estoril, Portugal, pp. 405–412 (May 2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Kiss, D., Madden, N., Logan, B. (2012). Atomic Intentions in Jason + . In: Collier, R., Dix, J., Novák, P. (eds) Programming Multi-Agent Systems. ProMAS 2010. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 6599. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28939-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28939-2_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-28938-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-28939-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)