An operational semantics for a PRS-like agent architecture

Abstract

In recent years, there have been increased efforts towards defining rigorous operational semantics for a range of agent programming languages. At the same time, there have been increased efforts to develop logical frameworks for modelling belief, desire and intention (and related notions) that make closer connections to the workings of particular architectures, thus aiming to provide some computational interpretation of these abstract models. However, there remains a substantial gap between the more abstract logical approaches and the more computationally oriented operational approaches. In this paper, we develop an operational semantics for a simplified language based on PRS that is derived directly from a high-level abstract interpreter; thus taking one step towards bridging this gap in the case of a simplified agent programming language sufficiently expressive to incorporate a simple notion of intention.