AGENTS VIC Meeting

Friday, 26 February 2010 @ 9:30AM.
Coffee, tea and refreshments from 9:15.

University of Melbourne, Rm 5.08, ICT Building (Dept of CSSE), 111 Barry St.

The first speaker will be Dhirendra Singh from RMIT who will present his AAMAS 2010 paper "Learning Context Conditions for BDI Plan Selection". The second speaker will be Louis Liu from the University of Melbourne who will present his talk "Hazard Identification and Analysis for Multi-Agent Systems".

Dhirendra Singh, RMIT

Learning Context Conditions for BDI Plan Selection

An important drawback to the popular Belief, Desire, and Intentions (BDI) paradigm is that such systems include no element of learning from experience. In particular, the so-called context conditions of plans, on which the whole model relies for plan selection, are restricted to be boolean formulas that are to be specified at design/implementation time. To address these limitations, we propose a novel BDI programming framework that, by suitably modeling context conditions as decision trees, allows agents to learn the probability of success for plans based on previous execution experiences. By using a probabilistic plan selection function, the agents can balance exploration and exploitation of their plans. We develop and empirically investigate two extreme approaches to learning the new context conditions and show that both can be advantageous in certain situations. Finally, we propose a generalization of the probabilistic plan selection function that yields a middle-ground between the two extreme approaches, and which we thus argue is the most flexible and simple approach.

Louis Liu, UoM

Hazard Identification and Analysis for Multi-Agent Systems

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