Intention management within a BDI framework

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model of agency provides a powerful technique for describing goal-based behavior for both individual agents and, more recently, agent teams. Numerous frameworks have been developed since the model was first proposed in the early 1980’s. However, none of these frameworks have explicitly represented intention, which has meant that intention-based reasoning has had no direct framework support. Given the importance of this in the development of practical agent applications, we consider this to be a major shortcoming of existing frameworks. This paper explores how explicitly represented goals can be used as both a unifying modeling concept for the management of intention, and as the basis for a BDI framework. The exploration is grounded both in terms of software – a recently developed BDI framework called GORITE and in application – an execution system for a robotic assembly cell. Both are discussed in detail.