ON THE ROLE OF BDI MODELING FOR INTEGRATED CONTROL AND COORDINATED BEHAVIOR IN AUTONOMOUS AGENTS

Abstract

This paper describes an architecture for controlling and coordinating autonomous agents, building on previous work addressing reactive and deliberative control methods. The proposed multilayered hybrid architecture allows a rationally bounded, goal-directed agent to reason predictively about potential conflicts by constructing knowledge level models that explain other agents' observed behaviors and hypothesize their beliefs, desires, and intentions; at the same time, it enables the agent to operate autonomously, to react promptly to changes in its real-time environment, and to coordinate its actions effectively with other agents. A principal aim of this research is to understand the role dzfferent functional capabilities play in constraining an agent5 behavior under varying environmental conditions. To this end, an experimental test bed has been constructed comprising a simulated multi-agent world in which a variety of agent configurations and behaviors have been investigated. A number of experimentalfindings are reported.