TY - JOUR
T1 - The dMARS architecture
T2 - A specification of the distributed multi-agent reasoning system
AU - D'Inverno, Mark
AU - Luck, Michael
AU - Georgeff, Michael
AU - Kinny, David
AU - Wooldridge, Michael
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
PY - 2004/7
Y1 - 2004/7
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.
KW - Agent architectures
KW - BDI
KW - Formal specification
KW - Procedural reasoning system
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=3543059992&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1023/B:AGNT.0000019688.11109.19
DO - 10.1023/B:AGNT.0000019688.11109.19
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:3543059992
SN - 1387-2532
VL - 9
SP - 5
EP - 53
JO - Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
JF - Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
IS - 1-2
ER -