Intention as Commitment toward Time
This work addresses foundational issues in AI and multi-agent systems for researchers in formal logic and agent theory, but it is incremental as it builds on existing frameworks like AGM.
The paper tackles the problem of reasoning about intention, time, and belief in dynamic environments by developing a logic that ensures coherence between intentions and beliefs through action preconditions, and formalizes what-if scenarios for intention revision. It presents AGM-based postulates for iterated revision of belief-intention databases and proves a representation theorem.
In this paper we address the interplay among intention, time, and belief in dynamic environments. The first contribution is a logic for reasoning about intention, time and belief, in which assumptions of intentions are represented by preconditions of intended actions. Intentions and beliefs are coherent as long as these assumptions are not violated, i.e. as long as intended actions can be performed such that their preconditions hold as well. The second contribution is the formalization of what-if scenarios: what happens with intentions and beliefs if a new (possibly conflicting) intention is adopted, or a new fact is learned? An agent is committed to its intended actions as long as its belief-intention database is coherent. We conceptualize intention as commitment toward time and we develop AGM-based postulates for the iterated revision of belief-intention databases, and we prove a Katsuno-Mendelzon-style representation theorem.