On the use of agreement technologies for multi-criteria decision making within a BDI agent

Abstract

The BDI model, as a practical reasoning architecture aims at making decisions about what to do based on cognitives notions as beliefs, desires and intentions. However, during the decision making process, BDI agents also have to make background decisions like choosing what intention to achieve next from a set of possibly conflicting desires; which plan to execute from the plans that satisfy a given intention; and whether it is necessary or not to reconsider current intentions. Likewise, agreement technologies have proven to be effective mechanisms to reach agreements between agents with different preferences, as well as to conciliate different criteria within a single agent. Therefore, in this work, we present an abstract framework which incorporates agreement technologies in decision processes within BDI agents. Besides, from the mechanisms belonging to the research field of agreement technologies, a voting-based approach is also proposed.