G2i: A principled approach to leveraging the goal-to-information nexus in BDI agents

In a number of settings, information requirements must be guided by the current goals of an agent. This paper shows how information requirements can be systematically derived from goals by examining the executability conditions of plans and actions that help achieve that goal. We extend the standard BDI framework by annotating beliefs, plans and actions with probabilities and propose the use of information-seeking actions to meet the information requirements. We show how agents can use such information-seeking actions, which can be expensive to execute (often at the cost of other mission-critical actions), to increase the expected utility of their goals, and thereby present a novel variant of the standard BDI framework.