Integrating expectation handling into Jason

Abstract

Although expectations play an important role in designing cognitive agents, agent expectations are not explicitly being handled in most common agent programming environments. There are techniques for monitoring fulfilment and violation of agent expectations, however they are not linked with common agent programming environments so that agents can be easily programmed to respond to these circumstances. This paper investigates how expectation monitoring tools can be tightly integrated with the Jason BDI agent interpreter by extending it with built-in actions to initiate and terminate monitoring of expectations, and demonstrates how an external expectation monitor is linked with Jason using these internal actions.