Abstract Process Description

Hi all. 

I would like to know whether there is some way of defining an abstract process 
description envisioned.  By this, I mean a process description, which cannot 
be executed directly, but which gives a guideline for reasoners (such as 
graphplan), how a process basically looks like, so that agents can do some 
planning. 

Lets say I want to travel to New York.  In order to do this, an abstract 
process description might tell me something like:  
Travel2NY = 
GetFlight2NY
GetAccomadationInNY
GetFlightBack
OR
GetFlight2NYandBack
GetAccomodationInNY

This would be close to a CompositeProcess description, but on the profile 
level, since the process description hierarchy is build on that level. Now 
with the description given above, my agent could check the profile hierarchy 
for instances of GetFlight2NY. These might be instances of GetFlight or a 
subclass with hasValue of destination set to NY. Then it could do the same 
with GetAccomodation where location is set to NY. 
Now some of these processes could themselves be abstract and my agent has to 
find some instances of subprocesses and so  on. This would however mean that 
the whole descriptive power of CompositeProcess had to be doubled and fit in 
the ProfileDescription somehow. However, this way one could build a library 
of profiles defining either concrete processes or abstract processes. 

Is there a way to do something like this or is this simply out of the scope of 
DAML-S and should be done by some other means.


Regards, 

Jan Ortmann
University of Hamburg, Germany

Received on Sunday, 15 June 2003 09:02:29 UTC