Goal-Oriented Development of BDI Agents: The PRACTIONIST Approach

The representation of goals and the ability to reason about them play an important role in goal-oriented requirements analysis and modelling techniques, especially in agent-oriented software engineering, as goals are more stable than other abstractions (e.g. user stories). In PRACTIONIST, a framework for developing agent systems according to the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) model, goals play a central role. Thus, in this paper we describe the structure of the goal model in the PRACTIONIST framework and how agents use their goal model to reason about goals, desires, and intentions during their deliberation process and means-ends reasoning as well as while performing their activities.