Modeling Complex Domains of Actions and Change

This paper studies the problem of modeling complex domains of actions and change within highlevel action description languages. We investigate two main issues of concern: (a) can we represent complex domains that capture together different problems such as ramifications, nondeterminism and concurrency of actions, at a high-level, close to the given natural ontology of the problem domain and (b) what features of such a representation can affect, and how, its computational behaviour. The paper describes the main problems faced in this representation task and presents the results of an empirical study, carried out through a series of controlled experiments, to analyze the computational performance of reasoning in these representations. The experiments compare different representations obtained, for example, by changing the basic ontology of the domain or by varying the degree of use of indirect effect laws through domain constraints. This study has helped to expose the main sources of co...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Antonis C. Kakas, Loizos Michael
• Keywords: Complex Domains, CORR 2002, Education, Main, Main Issues