SailAway: Formalizing Navigation Rules
Frank Dylla, Stefan Wölfl · 2007
Abstract. Agents that have to solve navigational tasks need to consider aspects that go far beyond single-agent goal-directed deliberation: What an agent does in a specific situation often interferes with what other agents do at the same time. In order to avoid conflicts or even collisions, situations in space are governed by laws, rules, and agreements between the involved agents. For this reason, artificial agents interacting with humans must be able to process such rule sets, which are usually formulated in natural language. In this paper we present a case study on how to formalize navigation rules in the domain of sea navigation. We present an approach that uses qualitative representations of navigation rules. Qualitative spatial reasoning methods can be applied to distinguish permissible actions in the set of all possible actions. We argue that an agent’s spatial representation can be modeled on a qualitative level in a natural way and that this also empowers sophisticated high-level agent control. 1