Supporting group plans in the BDI architecture using coordination middleware

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of group plans and goals as programming abstractions that encapsulate the communication needed to coordinate collaborative behaviour. It presents an extension of the BDI agent architecture to include explicit constructs for goals and plans that involve coordinated action by groups of agents. Formal operational semantics for group goals are provided, and an implementation of group plans and goals for the Jason agent platform is described, based on integration with the Zookeeper coordination middleware.