Lifeworld Analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces the concept of a 'lifeworld' to analyze agent/environment interactions, emphasizing conventions and invariants, and provides formal tools to describe and compare different control structures within this framework.

Contribution

It extends traditional environment analysis by formalizing the notion of a lifeworld, capturing conventions and invariants, and demonstrates this with an analysis of the Toast system.

Findings

Different control structures can implement a common control framework.

Conventions for encoding task state vary across system versions.

Formal tools effectively describe and compare lifeworld structures.

Abstract

We argue that the analysis of agent/environment interactions should be extended to include the conventions and invariants maintained by agents throughout their activity. We refer to this thicker notion of environment as a lifeworld and present a partial set of formal tools for describing structures of lifeworlds and the ways in which they computationally simplify activity. As one specific example, we apply the tools to the analysis of the Toast system and show how versions of the system with very different control structures in fact implement a common control structure together with different conventions for encoding task state in the positions or states of objects in the environment.