Enabling Goal Oriented Action Planning with Goal Net

In this paper, we propose an agent planning system based on the Goal Net model. The agent’s goals are identified and organized in a composite goal hierarchy. Three kinds of relations between goals are defined: choice, concurrency and synchronization. Actions between goals are designed to accomplish subsequent goals. The agent’s desire is satisfied by accomplishing a serial of intermediary goals and finally achieving the ultimate goal that is satisfying the desire. The agent’s action plan is a list of actions to accomplish the intermediary goals in the solution. Because Goal Net is designed by considering agent’s possible desires directly, this bridges the distance between BDI agent design and the planning system. A searching algorithm is proposed to select goals in Goal Net. A case study of e-learning agent is shown to demonstrate the planning system.