ECAI 2004 Conference Paper

[full paper]

Goal specification in presence of non-deterministic actions

Chitta Baral, Jicheng Zhao

One important aspect in directing cognitive robots or agents is to formally specify what is expected of them. This is often referred to as goal specification. For agents whose actions have deterministic consequences various goal specification languages have been proposed. The situation is different, and less studied, when the actions may have non-deterministic consequences. For example, a simple goal of achieving p, has many nuances such as making sure that p is acheived, trying ones best to achieve p, preferring guaranteed acheivement of p over possible acheievement, and so on. Similarly, there are many nuances in expressing the goal to try to acheieve p, and if it fails then to achieve q. We develop an extension of the branching time temporal logic CTL*, which we call pi-CTL*, and show how the above mentioned goals can be expressed using it, and why they can not be expressed in CTL*. We compare our approach to an alternative approach proposed in the literature.

Keywords: Goal Specification, temporal logic, Agent directives

Citation: Chitta Baral, Jicheng Zhao: Goal specification in presence of non-deterministic actions. In R.López de Mántaras and L.Saitta (eds.): ECAI2004, Proceedings of the 16th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2004, pp.273-277.