Plan Selection for Probabilistic BDI Agents

Abstract

When an agent wants to fulfill its desires about the world, the agent usually has multiple plans to choose from and these plans have different pre-conditions and additional effects in addition to achieving its goals. Therefore, for further reasoning and interaction with the world, a plan selection strategy (usually based on plan cost estimation) is mandatory for an autonomous agent. This demand becomes even more critical when uncertainty on the observation of the world is taken into account, since in this case, we consider not only the costs of different plans, but also their chances of success estimated according to the agent's beliefs. In addition, when multiple goals are considered together, different plans achieving the goals can be conflicting on their preconditions (contexts) or the required resources. Hence a plan selection strategy should be able to choose a subset of plans that fulfills the maximum number of goals while maintaining context consistency and resource-tolerance among the chosen plans. To address the above two issues, in this paper we first propose several principles that a plan selection strategy should satisfy, and then we present selection strategies that stem from the principles, depending on whether a plan cost is taken into account. In addition, we also show that our selection strategy can partially recover intention revision.