A Comparative Study on Appending Priority Relations of Rules in BDI-Based Agent Model

An effective way to solve the conflict of rules in agent model based on BDI is that applying the priority relation of rules. To make such model work normal, we must be sure that no circling priority of rules existing in the model when the new rules are added. The conventional checking method is based on computing the transitive closure, and an alternative approach is based on traveling the directive graph. These two methods have their own advantages and disadvantages. A comparative study on these two methods presented in this paper, which is to help users making a choice about the two methods in their application. We firstly descript both of these approaches in detail. Experimental results show that the method based on transitive closure is suitable for adding many rules, and the latter for adding a few rules. The lower boundary on the number of added priority relations about determining which approach should be chosen is approximate 170 rules appended.