Toward a Systematic Development of Affective Intelligent Agents

Abstract

The representation of the knowledge that is used for the specification of affective processes in agents, is almost as diverse as number of approaches that have addressed this issue. This diversity is due, to a large extent, to the need of systematic guidelines and standards that support computer scientists on the creation of affective models and architectures. Our aim is to perform a further step towards the standardization of this process, in order to improve the creation and enhancement of affective agent languages, architectures, and models. We offer a method to build affective BDI (Beliefs, Desires, and Intentions) agents, adapted to the problem to solve, and specifically, adapted to the way affect influences the agent behavior. To this end we offer GenIA³ , a General-purpose Intelligent Affective Agent Architecture, which can be committed with specific psychological theories to create the architecture of the final agent. We also offer general guidelines that allow to define the processes performed in the agent architecture. These guidelines allow to select and adapt a BDI agent platform in order to include the processes of the proposed agent architecture and adapt a BDI agent language to include the representation of the required affect-related attributes.