Simulating production rules using ACTHEX

Abstract

Production rules are a premier formalism to describe actions which, given that certain conditions are met, change the state of a factual knowledge base and/or effect a change of the external environment in which they are situated, based on an operational semantics. acthex is a recent formalism extending hex programs, such that the specification of declarative knowledge in the form of logic programming rules can be interleaved with a type of condition-action rules which prescribe the execution of (sequences of) actions that can change the external environment. Under the provision of a specific semantics of conditions, the operational semantics of production rules can be simulated using the model-based semantics of acthex. Given that the latter features abstract access to external sources of computation, it can capture a range of concrete execution semantics and, moreover, facilitate access to heterogeneous information sources. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.