A New Action Description Scheme for Informal Reasoning

Reasoning about Actions has an important place in the development of Intelligent Agents. While reasoning about Actions, Action Representation plays an important role. General practice is to use Preconditions and Posteffects for defining an Action. We believe that for an agent that assists humans in making decisions for daily life in a Smart Home environment, Preconditions are not adequate to represent the complexity due to the huge number of different situations resulting from various factors affecting a decision. We propose an extension to this basic idea by introducing the concept of Hindering and Supporting factors for Actions and argue that this can describe many Informal Reasoning situations more succinctly than traditional Action description schemes. We present the reasoning algorithm based on this new Action Description and show with examples how this new scheme helps in reaching more appropriate decisions in a Smart Home environment and hence improving the quality of living for its inhabitants.

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