A goal-directed rational component for emotional agents

This paper presents a goal-directed rational component of an emotional agent. A main feature of the proposed model of rational component concerns its interaction between rationality, personality and emotions, mainly in the goal selection and action selection processes and in the rational state evolution. Such evolution takes place in two ways: implicitly, the behavior of the rational component changes according to the current emotional state; explicitly, the emotional knowledge is encoded as facts in the working memory of a production system. The paper describes each component of the rational module, its mechanisms, its inputs and its outputs and how the interactions with emotions and personality are realized. Our research aims are directed toward applications of emotional agents to multimodal environments, with particular interest in intelligent interaction and communication by means of music, dance, movements of robots, visual media and in general applications where non-verbal communication mechanisms are the main communication channels between human and machines. Such requirements guided us in the definition of the model presented in this paper.