Actions made explicit in BDI

Abstract

The Belief, Desire, Intention (BDI) architecture is increasingly being used in a wide range of complex applications for agents. Many theories and models exist which support this architecture and the recent version is that of Capability being added as an additional construct. In all these models the concept of action is seen in an endogenous manner. We argue that the Result of an action performed by an agent is extremely important when dealing with composite actions and hence the need for an explicit representation of them. The Capability factor is supported using a RES construct and it is shown how the components of a composite action is supported using these two. Further, we introduce an OPP (opportunity) operator which in alliance with Result and Capability provides better semantics for practical reasoning in BDI.