Utilizing BDI Features for Transactional Agent Execution

Replanning, which discards all alternatives found in previous execution, and step-by-step backtracking, which iterates back through all previous selection decisions, are two extreme ends of exception handling in agent systems. We describe a new "jump" approach to maintaining a tradeoff between them. Choice points, which are maintained in a stack, are introduced to record all plans found by the agent\´s planning procedures. By iterating on the stack, and reasoning about plan characteristics, an agent can find and launch a suitable plan prior to or in parallel with a compensation process for the failed path, thus achieving its goals efficiently in the presence of exceptions. Our approach combines and utilizes several beneficial features of a BDI agent, such as its data structure and deliberation cycle, together with an open nested transaction system which supports architectural-level concurrency control and distribution management.