GOAL Agents Instantiate Intention Logic

Abstract

It is commonly believed there is a big gap between agent logics and
computational agent frameworks. In this paper, we show that this gap is not as big
as believed by showing that GOAL agents instantiate Intention Logic of Cohen
and Levesque. That is, we show that GOAL agent programs can be formally
related to Intention Logic.We do so by proving that the GOAL Verification Logic
can be embedded into Intention Logic. It follows that (a fragment of) Intention
Logic can be used to prove properties of GOAL agents. The work reported is an
important step towards the application of standard tools from modal logic for e.g.
model checking agent programs. Our results also prove useful for extending the
expressiveness of the GOAL agent language. This is illustrated by incorporating
temporally extended goals into GOAL agents.