Goal delegation without goals: BDI agents in harmony with OCMAS principles

Abstract

The BDI model is concerned with the rational action of an individual agent. At the multi-agent layer especially coordination among agents is an important factor that determines how overall system goals can be accomplished. Thus, from a software engineering perspective it is desirable to extend the BDI programming model to the multi-agent layer and make BDI concepts also useable for coordination among agents. A severe problem with existing approaches that tried to follow this path e.g. by proposing a BDI teamwork model is that they violate the OCMAS principles stating that no assumptions on agent architectures should be made on the multi-agent level. If OCMAS principles are violated the kinds of agents that can participate in coordination is limited ab initio to a specific sort such as BDI. In this paper we propose a new goal delegation mechanism that allows for both. On the one hand, BDI agents can delegate their normal goals to other agents and on the other hand these goals are not represented explicitly on the multi-agent level so that also non-BDI agents can act as receivers and help accomplishing a goal. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.