Termination Properties of Transition Rules for Indirect Effects

Published: 12 Feb 2024, Last Modified: 06 Mar 2024ICAPS 2024EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Keywords: planning, indirect effects, termination, confluence, complexity
TL;DR: Theoretical analysis of indirect effects as used in Planning, KR, and elsewhere
Abstract: Indirect effects of agent's actions have traditionally been formalized as condition-effect rules that always fire whenever applicable, after each action taken by the agent. In this work, we investigate a core problem of indirect effects, the possibility of arbitrarily or infinitely long sequences of rule firings. Specifically we investigate the termination of rule firings, as well as their confluence, that is, the uniqueness of the state that is ultimately reached. Both problems turn out to be PSPACE-complete. After this, we devise practically interesting syntactic and structural restrictions that guarantee polynomial-time termination and confluence tests. Finally, in the context of planning languages that support indirect effects, we propose new implementation technologies.
Category: Long
Student: Graduate
Submission Number: 198
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