Deliberation and its Role in the Formation of Intentions
This work addresses the challenge of designing rational agents in real-world environments, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing models like decision trees and possible-worlds frameworks.
The paper tackles the problem of modeling deliberation for rational agents by proposing a branching time possible-worlds model to represent beliefs, goals, intentions, and other elements, and shows how agents can use decision trees for deliberation and possible worlds for intention formation.
Deliberation plays an important role in the design of rational agents embedded in the real-world. In particular, deliberation leads to the formation of intentions, i.e., plans of action that the agent is committed to achieving. In this paper, we present a branching time possible-worlds model for representing and reasoning about, beliefs, goals, intentions, time, actions, probabilities, and payoffs. We compare this possible-worlds approach with the more traditional decision tree representation and provide a transformation from decision trees to possible worlds. Finally, we illustrate how an agent can perform deliberation using a decision-tree representation and then use a possible-worlds model to form and reason about his intentions.