Event Sourcing in Jason: Event-Driven State Reconstruction for BDI Agents

Event sourcing is a software design pattern that uses a log of events as the ground truth for recreating an application’s state and for auditing purposes. In the context of agents, event sourcing uses event data captured from an agent’s runtime, allowing for complex queries to be made about its behaviour during a mission. We present a proof-of-concept of this insight in the form of an “agent simulator” for Jason (a BDI agent framework) to replay an agent’s decision-making process and reconstruct its state at any given point in time. Through this process, we identify discrepancies between Jason’s formal semantics and its Java implementation, leading us to propose revised semantic rules that accurately reflect an agent’s reasoning cycle during runtime and provide a foundation for event-based explainability in agent-based systems.