Leveraging new plans in AgentSpeak(PL)

Abstract

In order to facilitate the development of agent-based software, several agent programming languages and architectures, have been created. Plans in these architectures are often self-contained procedures with an associated triggering event and a context condition, while any further information about the consequences of executing a plan is absent. However, agents designed using such an approach have limited flexibility at runtime, and rely on the designer's ability to foresee all relevant situations an agent might have to handle. In order to overcome this limitation, we have created AgentSpeak(PL), an interpreter capable of performing state-space planning to generate new high-level plans. As the planning module creates new plans, the plan library is expanded, improving performance over time. However, for new plans to be useful in the long run, it is critical that the context conditions associated with new plans are carefully generated. In this paper we describe a plan reuse technique aimed at improving an agent's runtime performance by deriving optimal context conditions for new plans, allowing an agent to reuse generated plans as much as possible. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.