This paper investigates the use of group goals and plans as programming abstractions that provide explicit constructs for goals and plans involving coordinated action by groups of agents, with a focus on the BDI agent model. We define a group goal construct, which specifies subgoals that the group members must satisfy for the group goal to succeed, subject to timeouts on the members beginning work on the goal, and then completing their subgoals. A group plan containing one or more group goals can be dynamically distributed amongst a set of agents and jointly executed without a need for explicit coordinating communication between agents. We define formal semantics that model the coordination needed to determine a group goal’s success or failure as updates to a shared state machine for the group goal. We implement the semantics directly as rewrite rules in Maude, and verify using LTL model checking that the intended coordination behaviour is achieved. An implementation of group plans and goals for the Jason agent platform is also described, based on an integration of Jason with the ZooKeeper coordination middleware via a set of generic Jason plans supporting group goals, and the Apache Camel integration framework. A evaluation of the performance of this implementation is presented, showing that the approach is scalable.

本文研究了使用组目标和计划作为编程抽象的使用，这些抽象为涉及代理组协调行动的目标和计划提供显式构造，重点是 BDI 代理模型。我们定义了一个小组目标结构，它指定小组成员要成功实现小组目标必须满足的子目标，受制于成员开始为目标工作，然后完成他们的子目标的超时。包含一个或多个小组目标的小组计划可以在一组代理之间动态分配并联合执行，而无需代理之间的明确协调通信。我们定义了形式语义，该语义将确定组目标成功或失败所需的协调建模为对组目标共享状态机的更新。我们直接在 Maude 中将语义实现为重写规则，并使用 LTL 模型检查是否实现了预期的协调行为。还描述了 Jason 代理平台的组计划和目标的实现，基于 Jason 与 ZooKeeper 协调中间件的集成，通过一组支持组目标的通用 Jason 计划和 Apache Camel 集成框架。对这种实现的性能进行了评估，表明该方法是可扩展的。和 Apache Camel 集成框架。对这种实现的性能进行了评估，表明该方法是可扩展的。和 Apache Camel 集成框架。对这种实现的性能进行了评估，表明该方法是可扩展的。