Title: A transition function based characterization of actions
with delayed and continuous effects
Authors: Chitta Baral, Tran Son, Le-Chi Tuan
Abstract
In this paper we present a transition function based
characterization of actions in a realistic environment.
Our language allows for the specification of actions with duration,
continuous effects, delayed effects, dependency on
non-sharable resources, and accounts for parallel and
overlapping execution of actions. One of the main contribution of our paper
is a new definition of state in such an environment.
Our notion of state
encodes not only the fluent values but also obligations due to
delayed effect of actions that were executed recently. This allows
us to define a Markovian transition function. Although there
have been earlier attempts at developing action languages with
similar features, none of them present a transition
function based characterization.