Dealing with Incompatibilities among Procedural Goals under Uncertainty
  By considering rational agents, we focus on the problem of selecting goals
out of a set of incompatible ones. We consider three forms of incompatibility
introduced by Castelfranchi and Paglieri, namely the terminal, the instrumental
(or based on resources), and the superfluity. We represent the agent's plans by
means of structured arguments whose premises are pervaded with uncertainty. We
measure the strength of these arguments in order to determine the set of
compatible goals. We propose two novel ways for calculating the strength of
these arguments, depending on the kind of incompatibility that exists between
them. The first one is the logical strength value, it is denoted by a
three-dimensional vector, which is calculated from a probabilistic interval
associated with each argument. The vector represents the precision of the
interval, the location of it, and the combination of precision and location.
This type of representation and treatment of the strength of a structured
argument has not been defined before by the state of the art. The second way
for calculating the strength of the argument is based on the cost of the plans
(regarding the necessary resources) and the preference of the goals associated
with the plans. Considering our novel approach for measuring the strength of
structured arguments, we propose a semantics for the selection of plans and
goals that is based on Dung's abstract argumentation theory. Finally, we make a
theoretical evaluation of our proposal.
