Declarative planning in procedural agent architectures

• Our main contribution is a mapping between traditional generic agent languages (which serve as the blueprint for most modern agent languages) and classic planning formalisms.
• This gives an agent greater runtime flexibility, using its plan library and domain knowledge to respond quickly when possible, but planning when pre-encoded plan structures are insufficient.
• This paper expands on work in the context of BDI plan generation and plan library expansion, adding a formal underpinning to the planning architecture and detailing its properties.

Practical agent languages and their corresponding architectures have often relied on a static plan library with more or less direct trigger-response activation mechanisms as a source for agent behaviours for the sake of runtime efficiency. Although efficient, such a language design choice severely limits an agent’s ability to reason about its goals and adapt to unforeseen circumstances after being deployed. This effectively delegates the task of planning to the designers themselves, who must design plan libraries able to cope with every foreseeable situation an agent might find itself in by designing plans to deal with any contingency. In this paper we develop a formal conversion process from traditional BDI agent languages into declarative planning. Using this conversion process, we show how to integrate domain independent planning algorithms into the BDI interpreter, allowing a designer to program an agent not only through the trigger-response mechanism used in traditional languages, but also in terms of declarative goals. Our contribution here is twofold: firstly we increase an agent’s ability to cope with unforeseen situations and secondly we unburden an agent designer from having to define multiple plan combinations that could be easily generated by a planner.