On Deliberation under Incomplete Information and the Inadequacy of Entailment and Consistency-Based Formalizations

Much of the work in agent programming assumes an execution model where an agent has a knowledge base (KB) about the current state of the world, and makes decisions about what to do in terms of what is entailed or consistent with this KB. Deliberation or planning then would involve looking ahead and gauging what would be consistent or entailed at various stages by future KBs. We show that in the presence of sensing, this account of deliberation does not work properly, and propose an alternative that does.