Deriving Procedural and Warning Instructions from Device and Environment Models

TL;DR

This paper presents a formal method for generating procedural and warning instructions for household appliances by reasoning with device and environment models using situation calculus.

Contribution

It introduces a formal framework that derives instructions from device and environment knowledge, enabling automated instruction generation from device specifications.

Findings

Formal planning knowledge characterizes device behavior.

Procedural and warning instructions can be generated from basic plans.

Instruction generation can be automated from formal device models.

Abstract

This study is centred on the generation of instructions for household appliances. We show how knowledge about a device, together with knowledge about the environment, can be used for reasoning about instructions. The information communicated by the instructions can be planned from a version of the knowledge of the artifact and environment. We present the latter, which we call the {\it planning knowledge}, in the form of axioms in the {\it situation calculus}. This planning knowledge formally characterizes the behaviour of the artifact, and it is used to produce a basic plan of actions that the device and user take to accomplish a given goal. We explain how both procedural and warning instructions can be generated from this basic plan. In order to partially justify that instruction generation can be automated from a formal device design specification, we assume that the planning knowledge is {\it derivable\/} from the device and world knowledge.