An operational semantics for a fragment of PRS

de Silva, Lavindra; Meneguzzi, Felipe; Logan, Brian

Abstract

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is arguably the first implementation of the Belief–Desire–Intention (BDI) approach to agent programming. PRS remains extremely influential, directly or indirectly inspiring the development of subsequent BDI agent programming languages. However, perhaps surprisingly given its centrality in the BDI paradigm, PRS lacks a formal operational semantics, making it difficult to determine its expressive power relative to other agent programming languages. This paper takes a first step towards closing this gap, by giving a formal semantics for a significant fragment of PRS. We prove key properties of the semantics relating to PRS-specific programming constructs, and show that even the fragment of PRS we consider is strictly more expressive than the plan constructs found in typical BDI languages.

Citation

de Silva, L., Meneguzzi, F., & Logan, B. (2018). An operational semantics for a fragment of PRS

• Conference Name: 27th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) and the 23rd European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI)
• End Date: Jul 19, 2018
• Acceptance Date: Apr 16, 2018
• Publication Date: Jul 18, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jul 16, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 18, 2018
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Public URL: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/id/eprint/52959
• Related Public URLs: https://www.ijcai-18.org/
• Copyright Statement: Copyright information regarding this work can be found at the following address: http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/end_user_agreement.pdf