Goal-oriented behaviors are a set of techniques aimed at giving agents not only a sense of intelligence, but also a sense of free will, once a goal is defined, and given a set of rules to choose from.
Imagine that we're developing a trooper agent that needs to only reach the endpoint of capturing the flag (the main goal), while taking care of its life and ammo (the inner goals for reaching the first). One way of implementing it is by using a general-purpose algorithm for handling goals, so the agent develops something similar to free will.
We will learn how to create a goal-based action selector that chooses an action considering the main goal, avoids unintentional actions with disrupting effects, and takes an action's duration into account. Just like the previous recipe, this requires the modeling of goals in terms of numerical values.