Reasoning About Intended Actions

Abstract

In most research on reasoning about actions and reasoning about narratives one either reasons about hypothetical execu-tion of actions, or about actions that actually occurred. In this paper we develop a high level language that allows the expression of intended or planned action sequences. Unlike observed action occurrences, planned or intended action oc-currences may not actually take place. But often when they do not take place, they persist, and happen at an opportune future time. We give the syntax and semantics for expressing such intentions. We then give a logic programming axioma-tization and show the correspondence between the semantics of a description in the high level language, and the answer sets of the corresponding logic programming axiomatization. We illustrate the application of our formalism with respect to reasoning about trips.