Safety Shields, an Automated Failure Handling Mechanism for BDI Agents

The Belief Desire Intention model is a widely used architecture for developing rational agents. Because of its expressiveness, the task of programming a BDI agent can be challenging, especially when applied to safety-critical scenarios. In such scenarios, it is important to provide a safeguard for the critical behaviour of the agent. In this paper, we summarise how to extend the agent's reasoning cycle in the BDI model with safety shields. A safety shield works as a sandbox for the agents' plans that is enforced at runtime so that the agent behaves according to a safety formal specification. A runtime monitor is automatically synthesised from a shield to detect any failure that is within the scope of the shielded plan.