M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. Singh, A. Rao, and M. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag LNAI 1365, 1998.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....Goals have two aspects: declarative, where a goal is a description s of the state of the world which is sought (Env = s) and procedural, where a goal is a procedure P which is executed (in an attempt) to achieve the goal. Intelligent agent implementation platforms (such as PRS [6] dMARS [2], JAM [5] JACK [1] 3APL [4] and ConGOLOG [3] are intended for deployment in highly dynamic environments and as a result adopt the procedural view of goals. The use of the procedural aspect of goals is crucial to the practicality of these systems in highly dynamic environments. However, by ....

....in simplifying the development of intelligent agent systems, thus enabling this promising technology to reach its potential in the mass market. We have implemented CAN by a straightforward translation of the rules in figure 2 into Prolog. Our work improves on agent systems (such as PRS [6] dMARS [2], JAM [5] JACK [1] 3APL [4] and ConGOLOG [3] by (i) providing a precise semantics; ii) fixing various deficiencies with respect to the ideal BDI agent [14] for example agents should drop goals when they are either achieved, or become unachievable; and (iii) adding constructs which support ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. Singh, A. Rao, and M. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag LNAI 1365, 1998.

.... BDI concepts though we have found it necessary to clarify some of the differences between just what these concepts are in the initial philosophical work of Bratman [2] the logical theories of Rao and Georgeff [17] and others (e.g. 4, 21] and the implementations such as PRS [9, 10] dMars [1, 6] and JACK [3] We have also found it important to place some emphasis on the concepts of percepts and actions which appear in many generic models of agents (e.g. 20] and which are very important in the interfacing of the agent deliberation to the external environment. We have found a need to ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. Singh, A. Rao, and M. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pages 155--

....here range from simple pieces of code, representing entities that impact only minimally on the system, e.g. friendly shipping, to complex cognitive models, for key entities such as enemy aircraft or crew members. The most sophisticated agents are built in a BDI based agent language such as dMARS [2] or JACK [1] Operators are represented in terms of their beliefs, goals and intentions plans. A plan is a recipe to achieve a particular goal, whereas an intention is a particular instantiation of a plan. The agents, represented in figure1, go through a continuous cycle of: 1. Situation ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. P. Singh, A. Rao, and M. J. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV, volume 1365 of Springer Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, pages 155-176. Springer, 1997.

....they do not take into account the semantics of the agent communication language. Therefore, another kind of development tool, called agent development toolkit, was introduced to provide the developer with high level abstraction from the BDI agent architecture [44] These tools, such as dMars [11], Jack [6] AgentBuilder [35] Jam [18] and Zeus [27] provide a way for rapidly prototyping agents but 13 they do not seem to produce sufficiently robust and efficient agents for their adoption in industrial strength projects mainly because of their immaturity. Recently, we implemented an ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck and M. Wooldridge, A Formal Specification of dMARS. (M.P. Singh, A.S. Rao and M. Wooldridge Eds) Intelligent Agents IV, pp. 155-176, Springer-Verlag LNAI, vol. 1365, 1998. 16

.... to emerge as a viable solution for large scale industrial and commercial applications, there is an increasing need to ensure that the systems being developed are robust, reliable and fit for purpose [2] Previous work on formal modeling agent systems includes the DESIRE model [4] the dMARS model [5], and agent models based on Petri nets [6] The DESIRE model provides a compositional framework for modeling agents, and the dMARS model is based on Procedure Reasoning System (PRS) which supports formal reasoning. A typical example of agent models based on Petri nets is Moldt and Wienberg s ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck and M. Wooldridge, "A Formal Specification of dMARS," In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, Singh, Rao and Wooldridge (eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 1365, 155-176, Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....more widely used, demand for unambiguous specifications of architectures increases and there is a greater need to verify implementations of architectures. To this end, a range of techniques have been used to formally specify agent architectures (eg Concurrent MetateM [7, 26] DESIRE [3, 24] and Z [5]) However, these techniques typically fall short in at least one of the following ways: i) they enforce a particular view of architecture upon the specification; ii) they offer no explicit structures for 1 modelling the components of an architecture or the relationships between them; iii) ....

....between the two. Our work, on the other hand, maintains a clear link between specification and implementation through the direct execution of the specification as exemplified in our running example. This relation to direct execution also distinguishes our work from that on modelling agents in Z [5], since it is not yet possible to directly execute a Z specification 5 . More directly related to our work is that on DESIRE and Concurrent MetateM. DESIRE [3, 24] is a modelling framework originally conceived as a means of specifying complex knowledge based systems. DESIRE views both the ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. P. Singh, A. S. Rao, and M. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV, pages 155--176. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998.

.... :in room(2) light on(1) light on(2) the call to achieve( light on(1) will execute the sequence of actions: down; down; getin(1) toggle(1) The above formulation of the behaviour of the agent has many similarities with agent programming languages based on the BDI paradigm such as dMARS [7]. As in dMARS, plans are triggered by goals and are expressed as sequences of primitive actions, tests or goals. The main difference is in the control of the interpreter. In our case we rely on a standard sequential Prolog interpreter and we assume to have only one goal at a time to achieve, ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A Formal Specification of dMARS, in Proc. ATAL'97, LNAI 1365, pages 155--176, 1997. 6

....BDI architecture has been implemented in a number of systems. Of these, two are of particular relevance to JACK since they represent its immediate predecessors. The first generation is typified by the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) 2] developed by SRI International in the mid 80s. dMARS [3], built in the mid 90s by the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute in Melbourne, Australia, is a second generation system. dMARS has been used as development platform for a number of technology demonstrator applications, including simulations of tactical decisionmaking in air operations ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, M. Wooldridge, "A Formal Specification of dMARS", INTELLIGENT AGENTS IV: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, M. Singh, M.Wooldridge, and A. Rao (editors), LNAI 1365, SpringerVerlag, 1998.

....more widely used, there is an increasing demand for unambiguous specifications of them and there is a greater need to verify implementations of them. To this end, a range of techniques have been used to formally specify agent architectures (eg Concurrent MetateM [9, 27] DESIRE [3, 25] and Z [6]) However, these techniques typically fall short in at least one of the following ways: i) they enforce a particular view of architecture upon the specification; ii) they offer no explicit structures for modelling the components of an architecture or the relationships between them; iii) they ....

....between the two. Our work, on the other hand, maintains a clear link between specification and implementation through the direct execution of the specification as exemplified in our running example. This relation to direct execution also distinguishes our work from that on modelling agents in Z [6], since it is not yet possible to directly execute a Z specification. It is possible to animate specifications, which makes it possible to see what would happen if the specification were executed, but animating agent specifications is some way from providing operational agents. Our work also ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. P. Singh, A. S. Rao, and M. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV, pages 155--176. Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1998.

....the simulation. With careful design these plans can be read and understood by lay people with little or no additional explanation. A detailed description of the dMARS system as it pertains to air combat modeling can be found in [19] and further dMARS specific information may be obtained from [5]. INVOCATION ( told (intercept team target) told env) CONTEXT (and (myname self) role in team team CONTROL self role) max missile range max range) P2 P3 P8 START P9 P10 P12 P14 END1 END2 P15 ( role LEADER) role WINGMAN) fire missile target) ....

M. dInverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, M. Wooldridge. A Formal Specification of dMARS. In M. Wooldridge and A. Rao, editors, Fourth International Workshop on Theories, Architectures, and Languages, 1997.

....distributed system they are likely to be error prone and hence a formal semantics is important to facilitate 2 simulation and verification. Some attempts have been made to formally underpin already implemented systems by means of formal specification methods in software engineering (see, e.g. [8]) But this does neither amount to a declarative semantics nor to the possibility of executable specifications. To put it in a nutshell, the difficulty lies in the right degree of abstraction to accommodate both for a high level declarative specification and an operational semantics. By combining ....

....in [36] where so called plans which are similar to our reaction rules are introduced. Such agent specifications are in principle executable, but the actual translation executable in PRS is left open. Recently, the data structures of the commercial successor of PRS, dMars, have been formalised [8] and thus allow for verification of the practical system. Nevertheless, the gap between datastructures for belief, desire, intention in PRS or dMARS and the modal BDI logics is not yet closed. In contrast to this, vivid agents are executable specifications with a formal semantics, thus bridging ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, pages 155--176. LNAI 1365, Springer Verlag, 1998.

....prohibit going into further details of the various aspects of this work, but we hope that it has been possible to show how increasing levels of analysis and detail enable transition between abstract conceptual infrastructure and implemented system. 8 Summary Our efforts with BDI agents [4, 3] have provided formal computational models of implemented systems and idealised systems, using the Z specification language [18] a standard (and commonly used) formal method of software engineering. The benefit of this work is that the formal model is much more strongly related to the ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, volume 1365, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....an existing model so that it offers greater flexibility of control and is suitable for use in a dynamic virtual environment. The base architecture is inspired by, and derived from an example of possibly the best known class of agent architecture, the belief desire intention (BDI) model. dMARS [3] is an implemented and deployed commercial system that underlies this work, and is extended through the inclusion of mechanisms for motivated behaviour similar to artificial life approaches. The architecture is applied in a virtual city where emergency services must be coordinated to deal with ....

....in agent oriented programming has been noted elsewhere [4] In this section we present an agent architecture specifically developed for autonomous agents with the kinds of requirements discussed in Section 2. The architecture is inspired by the distributed Multi Agent Reasoning System (dMARS) [3], a highly successful commercial architecture based on the belief desireintention (BDI) model [2,6,7] 4.1 The Architecture Our conceptual model of autonomous agent behaviour revolves around its requirements. Up to now we have discussed the requirements of an agent without reference to its ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In A. Singh, M. Rao and M. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, volume 1365, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....from the same tradition, e.g. 2, 13] all have rather different specific architectural bases. As a means of building up a general model of power and norms, we start by offering an abstract BDI architecture, which does not fit with any specific model, but is inspired by previous work on dMARS [10] and AgentSpeak(L) 11] It includes the salient features, but omits irrelevant details. The model itself follows this previous work and consequently we do not provide an extensive description. In what follows, we use the Z specification language to construct a formal model of the BDI agents and ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV (ATAL97), LNAI 1365, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....effort also started with an implemented system and formalized its operational semantics in an agent language. This resulted in AgentSpeak(L) which can be viewed as an abstraction of the implemented Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) 13] and the Distributed Multi Agent Reasoning System(dMARS) [7], and which allows agent programs to be written and interpreted [22] In this paper, we build on this latter work by developing a strongly typed, formal, yet computational model of the AgentSpeak(L) language. Using the Z specification language [27] the paradigm formal method of software ....

....and in this specification we distinguish between calling the former plans and the latter plan instances. In AgentSpeak(L) a plan instance has the same type as a plan (although in other BDI systems such as the Procedural Reasoning System [13] plan instances and plans do not have the same type [7]) PlanInstance = Plan 10 Engineering AgentSpeak(L) A Formal Computational Model 4.3 Intentions Intentions are plans for which a commitment to execute is made. Such commitment is needed to avoid infinite evaluation of alternatives to force action. More precisely, an intention is a stack of ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages (ATAL'97). Springer Verlag, To Appear 1998.

....of yet more agent based languages and architectures with inadequate justification and relation to the broader field, we have been working on a more uniform perspective to enable a stronger inter relation and comparison of different systems and approaches. For example, work on specifying dMARS [2] and AgentSpeak(L) 3] in a consistent fashion, and on comparing 3APL, AgentSpeak(L) and AGENT 0 [6] has attempted to address these concerns and, in so doing, has helped to clarify the agent oriented approach and more gen # Department of Computer Science, Universiteit Utrecht, P.O. Box 80.089; ....

....general and more accessible way, and to provide a route to system development. This is achieved through the use of the standard well known and commonly used formal specification language, Z [8] which has also been used to specify several other agent properties, languages and architectures (e.g. [2, 3, 4]) As a consequence, we get a uniform presentation of both the 3APL language and its architecture in a clear and concise way, which enables it to be more easily related to, and compared with, other systems. We believe that our work moves a step closer to a unified account of different agent ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge, `A formal specification of dMARS', in Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, LNAI 1365, pp. 155--176. Springer, (1998).

....the more detailed aspects involved in dealing with the transition of a fully designed system, rather than an outline structure. Second, we allow an easy and simple comparison of 3APL and its competitor systems that have been specified in a similar style such as AgentSpeak(L) 3] and dMARS [2], as illustrated in [6] Third, we provide an accessible resource in the specification of techniques for the development of agent systems that might not otherwise be available in a form relevant both to agent architects and developers. This work can thus be viewed in a standalone fashion in ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 1365, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....A primitive action is simply a base action as defined in the agent framework. An action template provides a high level description of what is required by an action, defined as the set of all primitive actions that may result through an instantiation of that action template. For example, in dMARS [5], template actions represent action formulae containing free variables, and become primitive actions when bound to values. Concurrent primitive and concurrent template actions are primitive actions and action templates performed concurrently. We define a new type, o#y JzS , as a ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, volume 1365, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....a function of the current environment and the agent s perceiving actions. Since agents are typically resource bounded, they may not be able to perceive the entire set of attributes and select a subset based on their current goals. For example, the distributed Multi Agent Reasoning System (dMARS) [62], may have a set of events that it has to process, where events correspond to environmental change. Each of these percepts is available to the agent but because of its limited resources it may only be able to process one event, and must make a selection based on its goals. The perception ....

....ran planforgoal h Plans This relatively straightforward refinement of the basic agent model shows how more sophisticated capabilities can be added to the framework to arrive at descriptions of more specific agents. Indeed, such definitions have been used to specify architectures for BDI agents [62, 73], for example. 7.2 Cooperation In a similar way we can investigate issues of multi agent systems such as the social relationships between agents. For example, two autonomous agents are said to be cooperating with respect to some goal if one of the agents has adopted goals of the other. That is ....

d'Inverno, M., Kinny, D., Luck, M. and Wooldridge, M. (1998) A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1365.

....structure, contains a series of type value definitions that can be declared either constant or variable. A capabilities document, on the other hand, contains a description and type of the capability and also a link to the code that implements the capability (in the same spirit as dMARS plans [5], for example) This enables the implementations to vary in order to suit executing platforms, or so as to provide newer versions of capabilities. It is envisaged that eventually the developer will have access to libraries of capabilities that can be linked to the agent descriptions. Goals, plans ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, volume 1365 of Lecture notes in Computer Science, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

....mental notions of belief, desire and intention, they are also distinctly popular among the plethora of existing agent architectures. Apart from the intuitive understanding of the BDI model, this popularity may be due to the successful practical application of BDI systems such as PRS [8] and dMARS [5] to diverse areas including malfunction handling on the space shuttle and air traffic control, for example. Though BDI architectures occupy an an important place in the design of intelligent agents, the limitation of the approach is that it is typically focussed on what might be called standard ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Singh, Rao, and Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV, pages 155--176. Springer, 1998.

....do creative synthesising of some of these already invented wheels. Where necessary, new wheels may be invented to link up the old ones. This position is vindicated by the ZEUS project which synthesises in one system many old wheels (Nwana et al. 1998) Other successful projects such as dMARS (d Inverno et al. 1998) and ADEPT (Jennings et al. 1996) also vindicate this position. The new wheels, such as coordination and visualisation, are simply there to link up old concepts. As a result, the whole then becomes greater than the sum of its different parts, and hence novel, but this does not mean it is ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck and M. Wooldridge, 1998. "A Formal Specification of dMARS" In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, Singh, Rao and Wooldridge (eds.), Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 1365, 155--176, Springer-Verlag.

....of yet more agent based languages and architectures with inadequate justification and relation to the broader field, we have been working on a more uniform perspective to enable a stronger inter relation and comparison of different systems and approaches. For example, work on specifying dMARS [1] and AgentSpeak (L) 2] in a consistent fashion, and on comparing 3APL, AgentSpeak(L) and AGENT 0 [6, 7] has attempted to address these concerns and, in so doing, helps to clarify the agent oriented approach and more general properties of agents. Our concern is with the notion of intelligent ....

.... a formal Z specification of the agent programming language 3APL [5] pronounced triple a p l ) and its architecture [6] Z is a well known and commonly used formal specification language [11] that has also been used to specify several other agent properties, languages and architectures (e.g. [4, 1, 2]) As a consequence, our use of Z allows us to develop a formal description of 3APL that can more easily be related to, and compared with, these other systems. Equally, Z enables a uniform presentation of both the 3APL language and its architecture in a clear and concise way. We are not familiar ....

[Article contains additional citation context not shown here]

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In Intelligent Agents IV: Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures and Languages, volume 1365, pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag, 1998.

.... The KGR approach [24, 23] was developed to fulfill the need for a principled approach to the specification of complex multi agent systems based on the belief desire intention (BDI) technology of the Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) and the Distributed Multi Agent Reasoning System (DMARS) [25, 8]. A key motivation of the work was to provided useful, familiar mechanisms for structuring and managing the complexity of such systems. The first and most obvious difference between the approach proposed here and KGR is one of scope. Our methodology does not attempt to unify the analysis and ....

M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A formal specification of dMARS. In M. P. Singh, A. Rao, and M. J. Wooldridge, editors, Intelligent Agents IV (LNAI Volume 1365), pages 155--176. Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Germany, 1997.

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M. d'Inverno, D. Kinny, M. Luck, and M. Wooldridge. A Formal Specification of dMARS. In Intl. Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, pages 146--166, Providence, RI, 1997.

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