Extending BDI Multi-Agent Systems with Situation Management

Abstract

We extend the BDI (belief desire, intention) agent model by enabling agent beliefs to be based on real-time situations that are generated by a situation management (SM) system. This has several advantages for multi-agent systems using BDI agents. First, because of the use of event correlation and data fusion techniques in situation management, agent platforms can support highly reactive distributed applications. Second, the situation manager provides a semantically rich representation of the world and can dynamically adapt its representation for situations over time. From the system architecture perspective, we discuss several alternatives for how existing BDI-capable agent platforms can incorporate this extension. These alternatives range from complete SM functionality in each agent to having shared SM functionality among multiple agents. We also consider environments where different agent platforms use our situation-based BDI (SBBDI) agent method and must interoperate. We include an example of an SBBDI agent system for homeland security threat assessment