Translating MFM into FOL: towards plant operation planning

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to translate multilevel flow modeling into first-order logic, enabling logical reasoning and planning for plant operations, including action preconditions and procedures.

Contribution

It presents a novel translation approach from MFM to FOL, facilitating the use of logical inference and planning techniques in plant operation modeling.

Findings

Successful translation of MFM into FOL demonstrated with a toy plant example.

FOL's expressivity allows describing actions and preconditions for planning.

Procedures with multiple actions can be derived using logical inference.

Abstract

This paper proposes a method to translate multilevel flow modeling (MFM) into a first-order language (FOL), which enables the utilisation of logical techniques, such as inference engines and abductive reasoners. An example of this is a planning task for a toy plant that can be solved in FOL using abduction. In addition, owing to the expressivity of FOL, the language is capable of describing actions and their preconditions. This allows the derivation of procedures consisting of multiple actions.