The internal characterization of an agent centres around the routine held by the agent and the elements that make up the routine.

A routine is the primary vehicle through which an agent can accomplish what it wants.

It is a template for the agent's recurring activities.

A routine consists of [intentional] elements, which include subgoals, subtasks, resources, and softgoals.(26)

A routine can be seen as a plan skeleton. It provides the rough outline for the specific actions to be carried out when instantiated, but allows the details to be worked out at the time of execution.

An agent's set of routines is explicitly enumerated in the Strategic Rationale model. (p26)

In order to refer to a particular set of choices in the SR graph, we introduce the notion of a routine. A routine is a subgraph in the SR graph with a single link to a "means" node from each "end" node.

A routine therefore represents one particular course of action among the multiple alternatives presented at each OR node - one means-ends branch out of the many possible to address each task component node.

(However, in the case of softgoals, since the means-ends links (SS [softgoal-softgoal] and ST [softgoal-task]) represent partial contributions of means to ends, a routine will include multiple means-ends links contribution to softgoals.)

The notion of a routine is used to refer to one process and its rationales.

The routine is a convenient unit of analysis when evaluating alternatives.

Routines typically have connections to other actors, via dependency links in Strategic Dependency models.

The term routine is used to convey the typically recurrent nature of a work process.

By describing a routine in terms of intentional elements [goals, tasks, resources, and softgoals), the SR model acknoweldges that additional problem solving usually takes place at the time a routine is carried out [Suchman83,87].

This is in contrast to mechanistic notions of procedure, or the concept of plan as a series of primitive actions in classical artificial intelligence. (p35)

A routine is a subgraph representing the rationales for one process (one particular combination of elements that constitutes a means for accomplishing some end).