Abstract

An important concept for intelligent agent systems is goals. Goals have two aspects: declarative (a description of the state sought), and procedural (a set of plans for achieving the goal). A declarative view of goals is necessary in order to reason about important properties of goals, while a procedural view of goals is necessary to ensure that goals can be achieved efficiently in dynamic environments. In this paper we propose a framework for goals which integrates both views. We discuss the requisite properties of goals and the link between the declarative and procedural aspects, then derive a formal semantics which has these properties. We present a high-level plan notation with goals and give its formal semantics.

Citations