Reasoning about abductive inferences in BDI agents

Abstract

The capability of a computational system to deal with unexpected, changing situations and limited perception of the environment is becoming more a more relevant, in oder to make systems flexible and more reliable. Multi-agent Systems offer a computing paradigm where properties such as autonomy, adaptability or flexibility are basic in the construction of agent-based solutions. However most of current implementations are not flexible enough to cope with important changes in the environment or information loss. In this paper we propose to introduce abductive reasoning mechanisms in BDI agents and show how such agents are able to operate with partial models of the environment.