Postulates for revising BDI structures

John Grant, Sarit Kraus, Donald Perlis, Michael Wooldridge

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

12 Scopus citations

Abstract

The process of rationally revising beliefs in the light of new information is a topic of great importance and long-standing interest in artificial intelligence. Moreover, significant progress has been made in understanding the philosophical, logical, and computational foundations of belief revision. However, very little research has been reported with respect to the revision of other mental states, most notably propositional attitudes such as desires and intentions. In this paper, we present a first attempt to formulate a general framework for understanding the revision of mental states. We develop an abstract belief-desire-intention model of agents, and introduce a notion of rationality for this model. We then present a series of formal postulates characterizing the processes of adding beliefs, desires, and intentions, updating costs and values, and removing beliefs, desires, and intentions. We also investigate the computational complexity of several problems involving the abstract model and comment on algorithms for revision.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)39-62
Number of pages24
JournalSynthese
Volume175
Issue numberSUPPL. 1
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010

Funding

Acknowledgements We thank the referees for their valuable comments, which led to substantial improvements to the paper. This research was supported by the NSF, the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, and the Office of Naval Research.

FundersFunder number
National Science Foundation0803739
Office of Naval Research
Air Force Office of Scientific Research

    Keywords

    • BDI agents
    • Belief revision
    • Intention revision
    • Revision postulates

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