A Classification of Cognitive Agents

In this paper we discuss a generic component of a cognitive agent architecture that merges beliefs, obligations, intentions and desires into goals. The output of belief, obligation, intention and desire components may conflict and the way the conflicts are resolved determines the type of the agent. For component based cognitive agents, we introduce an alternative classification of agent types based on the order of output generation among components. This ordering determines the type of agents. Given four components, there are 24 distinct total orders and 144 distinct partial orders of output generation. These orders of output generation provide the space of possible types for the suggested component based cognitive agents. Some of these agent types correspond to well-known agent types such as realistic, social, and selfish, but most of them are new characterizing specific types of cognitive agents.