Intention reconsideration in complex environments

Abstract

One of the key problems in the design of belief-desire-intention (BDI) agents is that of finding an appropriate policy for intention reconsideration. In previous work, Kinny and Georgeff investigated the effectiveness of several such reconsideration policies, and demonstrated that in general, there is no one best approach -different environments demand different intention reconsideration strategies. In this paper, we further investigate the relationship between the effectiveness of an agent and its intention reconsideration policy in different environments. We empirically evaluate the performance of different reconsideration strategies in environments that are to varying degrees dynamic, inaccessible, and nondeterministic. In addition to our empirical results, we are able to give preliminary analytical results to explain some of our findings.