Abstract

The importance of potential intentions has been demonstrated both in the construction of agent systems and in the formalisation of teamwork behaviour. However, there still lacks an adequate semantics for the notion of potential intentions as introduced by Grosz and Kraus in their SharedPlans framework. In this paper, we give a formal semantics to intentions and potential intentions, drawing upon both the representationalist approach and the accessibility-based approach. The model captures the dynamic relationship among intentions and potential intentions by providing semantic rules and conditions. Also, the model treats norms as a special class of intentional context, and it is shown that norms play a critical role in the dynamics of intentions in multiagent systems. The formal semantics allows us to validate some properties that are widely-accepted for intention attitudes.