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International Conference on Practical Applications of Agents and Multi-Agent Systems

PAAMS 2017: Advances in Practical Applications of Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection pp 82–94Cite as

Practical Reasoning About Complex Activities

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNAI,volume 10349)

Abstract

In this paper, we present an argument-based mechanism to generate hypotheses about belief-desire-intentions on dynamic and complex activities of a software agent. We propose to use a composed structure called activity as unit for agent deliberation analysis, maintaining actions, goals and observations of the world always situated into a context. Activity transformation produces changes in the knowledge base activity structure as well in the agent’s mental states. For example, in car driving as a changing activity, experienced and novice drivers have a different mental attitudes defining distinct deliberation processes with the same observations of the world. Using a framework for understanding activities in social sciences, we endow a software agent with the ability of deliberate, drawing conclusion about current and past events dealing with activity transformations. An argument-based deliberation is proposed which progressively reason about activity segments in a bottom-up manner. Activities are captured as extended logic programs and hypotheses are built using an answer-set programming approach. We present algorithms and an early-stage implementation of our argument-based deliberation process.

Keywords

  • Practical reasoning
  • Agents
  • Complex activity
  • Argumentation
  • Deliberation
  • Tool

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Fig. 1.

Adapted from [15]

Fig. 2.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Not only human activity but activity of any subject.

  2. 2.

    A general perspective about argumentation theory is presented in [4].

  3. 3.

    Semantic in terms of a semantic system [23]. A semantic system relates a set F of logical formulae to a set M of formal models, each representing a conceivable state of the world in enough detail to determine when a given formula represents a true assertion in that state of the world.

  4. 4.

    Some actions and operations are based on a self-driving vehicle example in [22].

  5. 5.

    Please, note that in atom: \( speed>0kmh^{co} \) the symbol > does not belong to the underlying language, it is a semantic interpretation of a world observation.

  6. 6.

    Assuming that \( AF_{op} = \langle \mathcal {H}_{op}, Att_{op} \rangle \) is the resulting argumentation framework obtained from R and \(SEM(AF_{op}) = \{Ext_1, \dots , Ext_m \}, (m \geqslant 1)\) is the set of extensions suggested by an argumentation semantics SEM.

  7. 7.

    Similarly Definition 6, assuming that \( AF_{obj} = \langle \mathcal {H}_{obj}, Att_{obj} \rangle \) is the resulting argumentation framework obtained from \( R^{'}\) and \(SEM(AF_{obj}) = \{Ext_1, \dots , Ext_m \}, (m \geqslant 1)\) is the set of extensions suggested by an argumentation semantics SEM.

  8. 8.

    Sources and manual instructions of the tool can be download in: https://github.com/esteban-g/recursive_deliberation.

  9. 9.

    e.g. the so called, “potential desires” and “potential initial goals” in [1, 2].

  10. 10.

    In [1] Definition 4 it is state that “Note that each desire is a sub-desire of itself”.

  11. 11.

    In this paper we do not address automatization, this particular topic is being currently explored by the authors.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Computing Science Department, Umeå University, Umeå, Sweden

    Esteban Guerrero & Helena Lindgren

Authors
  1. Esteban Guerrero
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  2. Helena Lindgren
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Correspondence to Esteban Guerrero .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Centre National de la Rech. Scientifique , Grenoble, France

    Yves Demazeau

  2. Malmö University , Malmö, Sweden

    Paul Davidsson

  3. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid , Madrid, Spain

    Javier Bajo

  4. Polytechnic Institute of Porto , Porto, Portugal

    Zita Vale

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Guerrero, E., Lindgren, H. (2017). Practical Reasoning About Complex Activities. In: Demazeau, Y., Davidsson, P., Bajo, J., Vale, Z. (eds) Advances in Practical Applications of Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection. PAAMS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10349. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59930-4_7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-59930-4_7

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