Cleaning Up the Mess: A Formal Framework for Autonomously Reverting BDI Agent Actions

In order to cope with abnormal situations, self-adaptive systems may perform remediation actions to guarantee an acceptable system behaviour while dealing with critical execution problems. When problems are solved, the effect of such actions may need to be reverted to return the system to a normal state. This leads to the general problem of providing systems with the ability of autonomously reverting actions. In this paper, we address this problem by proposing a formal framework that customises the belief-desire-intention (BDI) architecture, typically used to implement autonomous agents. This customisation involves steps to monitor agent actions and store reversion metadata, identify when and which actions must be reverted, and execute action reversion. Our formal approach was implemented as an extension of the BDI4JADE platform. This extension was used to evaluate our proposal with a case study in the context of smart homes.