Quantitative Operational Monitoring for BDI Agents

Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture is a popular framework for designing autonomous systems. As these systems make independent decisions and execute actions independent from humans, ensuring their safety and reliability becomes a major concern. Traditional verification methods often fail to give run-time operational insights into an agent’s behaviours, especially with quantitative assessments under uncertain conditions, such as imprecise actuating. Meanwhile, BDI agents, which rely on context-sensitive subtask expansion, act as they go e.g. selecting plans at run time. To address this, we have developed a monitoring method that combines realtime operational data with probabilistic verification. This approach allows us to quantitatively analyse the decisions of BDI agents as they occur to understand the impact of each decision as it happens.