Real-Time BDI Agents: A Model and Its Implementation

Real-Time BDI Agents: A Model and Its Implementation

Andrea Traldi, Francesco Bruschetti, Marco Robol, Marco Roveri, Paolo Giorgini

Proceedings of the Thirty-First International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 511-517. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2022/73

The BDI model proved to be effective for the developing of applications requiring high-levels of autonomy and to deal with the complexity and unpredictability of real-world scenarios. The model, however, has significant limitations in reacting and handling contingencies within the given real-time constraints. Without an explicit representation of time, existing real-time BDI implementations overlook the temporal implications during the agent’s decision process that may result in delays or unresponsiveness of the system when it gets overloaded. In this paper, we redefine the BDI agent control loop inspired by traditional and well establish algorithms for real-time systems to ensure a proper reaction of agents and their effective application in typical real-time domains. Our model proposes an effective real-time management of goals, plans, and actions with respect to time constraints and resources availability. We propose an implementation of the model for a resource-collection video-game and we validate the approach against a set of significant scenarios.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Agent Theories and Models
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Engineering Methods, Platforms, Languages and Tools
Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Knowledge Representation Languages
Planning and Scheduling: Scheduling
Planning and Scheduling: Real-time Planning