A Layered Environment for Reasoning about Action

Abstract

An intelligent systems reasons about -- controls, explains, learns about -- its action, thereby improving its efforts to achieve goals and function in its environment. In order to perform effectively, a system must have knowledge of the actions it can perform, the events and states that occur, and the relationships among instances of those actions, events and states. We represent such knowledge in a hiearchy of knowledge abstractions and impose uniform standards of knowledge content and representation on modules within each hierarchical level. We refer to the evolving set of such modules as the BB* environment. To illustrate, we describe selected elements of BB*: * the foundational BB1 architecture * the ACCORD framework for solving arrangement problems by means of an assembly method * two applications of BB1-ACCORD, the PROTEAN system for modeling protein structures and the SIGHTPLAN system for designing construction-site layouts * two hypothetical multifaceted systems that integrate ACCORD, PROTEAN and SIGHTPLAN with other possible BB* frameworks and applications.