Intentional agents

Abstract

Agents have mental attitudes such as belief, goal, commitment, plan, intention, etc. In this chapter, we propose a type of agent called Intentional Agents and discuss complex intention structures as the mental attitude of these agents. We consider intention structures for several forms of actions such as simple action, conditional action, repetitive action, concurrent actions, etc. We also extend this idea to mental actions in the form of meta intentions. Intentions are useful in reasoning with actions in future once they are committed to, particularly while (a) responding to unexpected events in the world with regard to an intended action, and (b) executing the action at the best available opportunity. However, complex intention structures result in computational overhead called mental effort for an agent. We measure the mental effort of an agent in terms of its intentions over time in different shopping scenarios and observe that repetitive (loop based) actions result in larger mental effort compared to simple and conditional actions.