Reasoning about Goals in BDI Agents: the PRACTIONIST Framework

The representation of goals and the ability to reason about them play an important role in goal-oriented requirements analysis and modelling techniques, especially in agent-oriented software engineering. Moreover goals are more useful and stable abstractions than others (e.g. user stories) in the analysis and design of software applications. Thus, the PRACTIONIST framework supports a goal-oriented approach for developing agent systems according to the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model. In this paper we describe the goal model of PRACTIONIST agents, in terms of the general structure and the relations among goals. Furthermore we show how PRACTIONIST agents use their goal model to reason about goals during their deliberation process and means-ends reasoning as well as while performing their activities.