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Position Systems in Dynamic Domains

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Abstract

A dynamic domain consists of a set of legal states and a transition function that maps states to states. AI formalisms for specifying dynamic domains have so far focused on describing the effects of actions, that is, the transition functions. In this paper we propose a notion of characteristic set of position systems for the purpose of describing legal states. A position system for a type of objects is a set of properties that are mutually exclusive, and that in each state, every object of the type must satisfy exactly one of these properties called its position under the position system. A set of position systems, one for each type of objects in the domain, is characteristic if there is a one-to-one mapping between legal states and sets of objects’ positions under these position systems. These position systems are useful for reasoning about these dynamic systems including planning. In particular, we show that once we have characteristic sets of position systems for a dynamic domain, planning can be done by writing rules about when to move objects from one position to another.

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Acknowledgements

This work grew out of an earlier work on moving objects [18], and we thank Ning Ding, Maonian Wu, and Haodi Zhang for useful discussions. This work was supported in part by HK RGC under GRF 616013.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, People’s Republic of China

    Jianmin Ji

  2. Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Fangzhen Lin

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  1. Jianmin Ji
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  2. Fangzhen Lin
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Correspondence to Jianmin Ji.

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Ji, J., Lin, F. Position Systems in Dynamic Domains. J Philos Logic 44, 147–161 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-014-9331-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-014-9331-9

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