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Goals in conflict: semantic foundations of goals in agent programming

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  • Published: 16 October 2008
  • Volume 18, pages 471–500, (2009)
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Goals in conflict: semantic foundations of goals in agent programming
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  • M. Birna van Riemsdijk1,
  • Mehdi Dastani2 &
  • John-Jules Ch. Meyer2 

  • 955 Accesses

  • 23 Citations

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Abstract

This paper addresses the notion of (declarative) goals as used in agent programming. Goals describe desirable states, and semantics of these goals in an agent programming context can be defined in various ways. We focus in this paper on the representation of conflicting goals. In particular, we define two semantics for goals, one for unconditional goals and one for conditional goals. The first is based on propositional logic, and the latter is based on default logic. We establish relations between and properties of these semantics.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Henry Prakken for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Also, we would like to thank Jan Broersen, Joris Hulstijn, and Leon van der Torre for discussions on the BOID framework. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous referees for many valuable comments and suggestions.

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This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Technische Universiteit Delft, Delft, The Netherlands

    M. Birna van Riemsdijk

  2. Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands

    Mehdi Dastani & John-Jules Ch. Meyer

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  1. M. Birna van Riemsdijk
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Correspondence to M. Birna van Riemsdijk.

Additional information

This title was inspired by the title of the PhD thesis of Harrenstein: Logic in conflict: logical explorations in strategic equilibrium [25].

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Open Access This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and source are credited.

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van Riemsdijk, M.B., Dastani, M. & Meyer, JJ.C. Goals in conflict: semantic foundations of goals in agent programming. Auton Agent Multi-Agent Syst 18, 471–500 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-008-9067-4

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  • Published: 16 October 2008

  • Issue Date: June 2009

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10458-008-9067-4

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Keywords

  • Agent programming languages
  • Goals
  • Logic
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