Year

2012

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

School of Computer Science and Software Engineering

Abstract

There has been considerable amount of research in the recent past on multi-agent systems (MAS) by researchers in the area of Artificial Intelligence. The Belief-Desire- Intention (BDI) software model is a software model developed for programming intelligent agents. It uses the concepts of agent's beliefs, desires and intentions to solve a particular problem in agent programming and provides a mechanism for separating the activity of selecting a plan from the execution of currently active plans. The BDI model provides a theoretical foundation for some of the essential features of autonomous agents and multi-agent systems.

For many applications, it is more convenient to let the user provide in real time, a more elaborate specification consisting of constraints and preferences over possible goal states. Then, let the system discover a plan for the most desirable among the feasible goal states. Although there has been considerable research in developing BDI based agent systems and languages, limited work has been done in developing BDI systems where users can specify explicit objectives and preferences in real time. In this thesis I provide extensions to BDI-based agent-oriented programming languages which help the agent in its decision making process. I integrate constraint logic programming into the BDI framework to provide the agent with enough autonomy to make measured and deliberative decisions in a constantly changing, dynamic environment. I further extend this framework to incorporate c-semiring based structure to capture user preferences.

FoR codes (2008)

0806 INFORMATION SYSTEMS

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Unless otherwise indicated, the views expressed in this thesis are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the University of Wollongong.