Practical Reasoning About Complex Activities

• Published in: Advances in Practical Applications of Cyber-Physical Multi-Agent Systems: The PAAMS Collection Vol. 10349; pp. 82 - 94
• Main Authors: Guerrero, Esteban, Lindgren, Helena
• Format: Book Chapter Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland Springer International Publishing AG 2017; Springer International Publishing
• Series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Subjects: Agents; Argumentation; Complex activity; Deliberation; Practical reasoning
• ISBN: 3319599291; 9783319599298; 9783319599304; 3319599305
• ISSN: 0302-9743; 1611-3349
• DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-59930-4_7

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.