The development of the research "Goal Formulation in Intelligent Agents" is anchored on the rationale that to be truly called "intelligent", an agent must not only be capable of knowing how to achieve its given goals; preferably, it must also have the capability to formulate its own goals. It must be able to detect its own goals, assess their feasibility, prioritize them, evaluate their validity as to whether they have to be acted upon, terminated, or suspended. This research has developed and implemented an intelligent system that is capable for formulating its own goals. Goal formulation refers to the intelligent behavior that an agent exhibits when reasoning about what goals to pursue and when to pursue them. It is an integrated reasoning mechanism that identifies the relevant goals that an agent needs to accomplish to affect the external world (Goal detection); constantly updates the qualitative and quantitative information attributed to the active goals as events unfold (Active goal status evaluation); assesses whether a goal is attainable through the application of the agent's own actions (Goal achievability assessment); and dynamically evaluates the relative merits of an agent's tasks, provides the agent with a sound basis to make a rational choice among a set of competing alternatives and then decides what to do next based on the choice made (Next action selection). In the development of the goal formulator, the types and structure of the required knowledge are identified; architectures for the various goal formulation components have been designed; and algorithms for the various goal formulation reasoning mechanisms (e.g. application of NPV economic decision criterion) have been developed and implemented in Prolog. To prove the applicability of the goal formulation concepts that this research had developed, the system was applied in the housekeeping domain. Simulations of some housekeeping cases are provided.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:285077 |
| Date | January 1999 |
| Creators | Bulos, Remedios de dios |
| Publisher | University of Sussex |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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