Abstract
In this paper we present an abstract agent programming language and its operational semantics which can be used to implement cognitive agents. This language consists of programming constructs to implement both the agent?s mental attitudes — interpreted as data structures — as well as the agent?s deliberation process. The agent can observe the environment, generate goal sets from desires, obligations, and intentions, selects goals, generate plans, and execute them. These actions can be combined in the deliberation language in a variety of ways to program the agent?s deliberation process. At the level of abstraction of our deliberation language, goal generation and planning are both characterized as conflict resolution procedures. For goal generation, obligation, desire and intention rules can conflict when the corresponding goals are incompatible. For planning, partial plans can be incompatible. In our approach, the incompatibility of plans can be derived from more detailed data structures such as resources of the agents, but the conflict procedure can also be programmed directly by the agent programmer.