Reasoning about the executability of goal-plan trees

Yao, Yuan; de Silva, Lavindra; Logan, Brian

Abstract

User supplied domain control knowledge in the form of hierarchically structured agent plans is at the heart of a number of approaches to reasoning about action. This knowledge encodes the “standard operating procedures” of an agent for responding to environmental changes, thereby enabling fast and effective action selection. This paper develops mechanisms for reasoning about a set of hierarchical plans and goals, by deriving “summary information” from the conditions on the execution of the basic actions forming the “leaves” of the hierarchy. We provide definitions of necessary and contingent pre-, in-, and postconditions of goals and plans that are consistent with the conditions of the actions forming a plan. Our definitions extend previous work with an account of both deterministic and non-deterministic actions, and with support for specifying that actions and goals within a (single) plan can execute concurrently. Based on our new definitions, we also specify requirements that are useful in scheduling the execution of steps in a set of goal-plan trees. These requirements essentially define conditions that must be protected by any scheduler that interleaves the execution of steps from different goal-plan trees.

Citation

Yao, Y., de Silva, L., & Logan, B. (2016). Reasoning about the executability of goal-plan trees. Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 10093, 176-191. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50983-9_10

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 16, 2016
• Publication Date: Dec 16, 2016
• Deposit Date: Oct 4, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Oct 4, 2017
• Journal: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Electronic ISSN: 0302-9743
• Publisher: Springer Verlag
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10093
• Pages: 176-191
• Book Title: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50983-9_10
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/833195
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-50983-9_10
• Additional Information: Part of: International Workshop on Engineering Multi-Agent Systems. EMAS 2016: Engineering Multi-Agent Systems.
• Contract Date: Oct 4, 2017