Summary: The agent programming language GOAL is a high-level programming language to program rational agents that derive their choice of action from their beliefs and goals. The language provides the basic building blocks to design and implementrational agents by means of a set of programming constructs. These programming constructs allow and facilitate the manipulation of an agent’s beliefs and goals and to structure its decision-making. GOAL agents are called rational because they satisfy a number of basic rationality constraints and because they decide to perform actions to further their goals based upon a reasoning scheme derived from practical reasoning. The programming concepts of belief and goal incorporated into GOAL provide the basis for this form of reasoning and are similar to their common sense counterparts used everyday to explain the actions that we perform. In addition, GOAL provides the means for agents to focus their attention on specic goals and to communicate at the knowledge level. This provides an intuitive basis for writing high-level agent programs. At the same time these concepts and programming constructs have a well-dened, formal semantics. The formal semantics provides the basis for defining a verication framework for GOAL for verifying and reasoning about GOAL agents which is similar to some of the wellknown agent logics introduced in the literature.
For the entire collection see [Zbl 1169.68001].