TY - GEN
T1 - A formal specification of dMARS
AU - d’Inverno, Mark
AU - Kinny, David
AU - Luck, Michael
AU - Wooldridge, Michael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1998.
PY - 1998/2/18
Y1 - 1998/2/18
N2 - The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.
AB - The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational agency. Despite the interest in PRS and BDI agents, no complete attempt has yet been made to precisely specify the behaviour of real PRS systems. This has led to the development of a range of systems that claim to conform to the PRS model, but which differ from it in many important respects. Our aim in this paper is to rectify this omission. We provide an abstract formal model of an idealised dMARS system (the most recent implementation of the PRS architecture), which precisely defines the key data structures present within the architecture and the operations that manipulate these structures. We focus in particular on dMARS plans, since these are the key tool for programming dMARS agents. The specification we present will enable other implementations of PRS to be easily developed, and will serve as a benchmark against which future architectural enhancements can be evaluated.
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84961379308
U2 - 10.1007/bfb0026757
DO - 10.1007/bfb0026757
M3 - Conference proceeding
AN - SCOPUS:84961379308
SN - 3540641629
SN - 9783540641629
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science
SP - 155
EP - 176
BT - Intelligent Agents IV: Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages
A2 - Singh, Munindar P.
A2 - Rao, Anand
A2 - Wooldridge, Michael J.
PB - Springer Berlin Heidelberg
T2 - 4th International Workshop on Agent Theories, Architectures, and Languages, ATAL 1997
Y2 - 24 July 1997 through 26 July 1997
ER -