A Possible Approach for Implementing Self-Awareness in JASON

Abstract

In Philosophy, the term awareness is often associated to theories of consciousness and self-referential behavior. In computer science, the awareness is a topic of increasing relevance in both Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence, being closely related to autonomy and proactiveness. We can distinguish two orders of awareness: the first order is the awareness of the environment also known as context-awareness; conversely, self-awareness is a higher order awareness (knowledge about one's own mental states). Nowadays, many agent oriented languages offer native instruments to implement context-awareness. However, self-awareness is not adequately supported and it requires further considerations. This paper focuses on implementation techniques, based on JASON, for creating software agents able to dynamically reason about their knowledge of the environment, as well as on their missions, capabilities and current execution state.