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Decidable Verification of Decision-Theoretic Golog

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Frontiers of Combining Systems (FroCoS 2017)

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Abstract

The Golog agent programming language is a powerful means to express high-level behaviours in terms of programs over actions defined in a Situation Calculus theory. Its variant DTGolog includes decision-theoretic aspects in the form of stochastic (probabilistic) actions and reward functions. In particular for physical systems such as robots, verifying that a program satisfies certain desired temporal properties is often crucial, but undecidable in general, the latter being due to the language’s high expressiveness in terms of first-order quantification, range of action effects, and program constructs. Recent results for classical Golog show that by suitably restricting these aspects, the verification problem becomes decidable for a non-trivial fragment that retains a large degree of expressiveness. In this paper, we lift these results to the decision-theoretic case by providing an abstraction mechanism for reducing the infinite-state Markov Decision Process induced by the DTGolog program to a finite-state representation, which then can be fed into a state-of-the-art probabilistic model checker.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Note that we can always simulate a deterministic action by a stochastic one that has only one outcome.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) research unit FOR 1513 on Hybrid Reasoning for Intelligent Systems, project A1.

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Correspondence to Jens Claßen .

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Claßen, J., Zarrieß, B. (2017). Decidable Verification of Decision-Theoretic Golog . In: Dixon, C., Finger, M. (eds) Frontiers of Combining Systems. FroCoS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66167-4_13

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66167-4_13

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