Introducing Actions into Qualitative Simulation

Abstract

Many potential uses of qualitative physics, such as robot planning and intelligent computer-aided engineering, require integrating physics with actions taken by agents. This paper proposes to augment qualitative simulation to include the effects of actions to form action-augmented envisionments. The action-augmented envisionment incorporates both the effects of an agent's actions and what will happen in the physical world whether or not the agent does something. Consequently, it should provide a richer basis for planning and procedure generation than any previous representation. This paper defines actionaugmented envisionments and an algorithm for directly computing them, along with an analysis of its complexity and suitability for different kinds of problems. We describe our initial implementation and discuss potential extensions, including incremental algorithms. Keywords: Qualitative reasoning, planning, artificial intelligence. Presented at the 2nd Qualitative Physics Workshop Pa...