Agents, Actions, and Environments

David Morley
AAII

Friday, 28th May 1999
0930 - 1100

Conference Room
CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences
Ground Floor, 723 Swanston Street, Melbourne.

Abstract:

Agent based systems, such as those based on BDI architectures, have been used to address many problems that require rapid responses to changes in the environment whilst having a global focus across a possibly distributed implementation.  However, where one or more agents are embedded in and interact with the real world, the semantics of the execution of the agents, their environment, and the interactions involved is not straightforward.  In the case of BDI agent systems, the understanding of the theoretical foundations has not matched advances in implementations.

In this talk I will discuss a logic of events and actions that can provide a solid theoretical foundation for the semantics of multi-agent systems and their interactions with a dynamic environment.  I will also discuss the application of the logic to the semantics of a simple class of BDI agents.

Biosketch:

David Morley has been an employee of AAII since its inception in 1988.  His PhD Thesis "Semantics of Actions, Agents, and Environments" submitted to the University of Melbourne is in the final stages of the examination process.