Monday 21 April 2008

Jason - note to self 6

Given a hypothetical execution as follows:
(1) an agent ag1 delegates a goal !g1 to an agent ag2;
(2) ag2 begins executing !g1 (as delegated by ag1);
(3) ag2 reaches a stage in the plan body of !g1 where it has to execute !g2;
(4) ag2 is in the process of executing !g2 (called from !g1);
(5) ag2 receives an 'unachieve !g1' message from ag1.

Now, in processing the 'unachieve' message, !g1 would be removed from the current set of intentions. !g2 (and any goals subsequently called by !g2 that are currently in the stack of intentions) would also be removed.

This is because all those plans chosen to achieve sub-goals would be within the stack of plans forming the intention, on top of the plan for !g1, which would be dropped (and everything on top of it too, necessarily).

HOWEVER... the case for !! is different (recall that this allows the agent to achieve a goal in a SEPARATE intention). In this case, if we choose to achieve a goal in a separate intention, we lose track of why we were trying to achieve the goal. Needless to say, although this (!!) operator is provided because it can be useful, this is one of the reasons why it should be used with care.

Modifying step (5) as "ag2 receives an 'unachieve !g2' message from ag1". In this case, !g1 will also be dropped since the 'unachieve' uses the '.drop_desire' intention. '.drop_desire(g2)' "kills" the intention where !g2 appears and no failure event is produced. If we used 'fail_goal' instead of 'drop_desire', this allows a different behaviour. With this, the plan for !g2 would be terminated and a failure of !g1 (note it's g1 here) would be created.

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