The representation and simulation for reasoning about action based on Colored Petri Net

Abstract

Reason about action of intelligent agent is surely one of the most exciting and challenging areas in Artificial Intelligence. Intelligent agents are embedded in an incomplete, dynamic environment to reason about action from the initial state to the final state. The Petri net as a mathematical model has the characteristics of dynamics, asynchronous, concurrent, and other features which make it can perfectly represent reasoning about action for agents and has the intuitive graphic representation for analysis. A new formalized representation method-CPNRA net (Colored Petri Net for reasoning about action) is advanced, the actions, states and the compound actions are formalized. And then a method for generating CPNRA net system is introduced which can make the agent reason about actions automatically and goal-targeted in the dynamic environment. Finally, the example office sending coffee is simulated and proves CPNRA net model as an effective method to represent reason about action.