Preliminary Thoughts Towards a Practical Theory of Reformulation for Reasoning about Physical Systems
Berthe Y. Choueiry, Sheila A. McIlraith, Yumi Iwasaki, Tony Loeser, Todd W. Neller, Robert S. Engelmore, Richard E. Fikes · 1998
In this paper, we provide a practical framework for characterizing, evaluating and selecting reformulation techniques for reasoning about physical systems, with the long-term goal of automating the selection and application of these techniques. We view reformulation as a mapping from one encoding of a problem to another. A problem solving task is in turn accomplished by the application of a sequence ofreformulations to an initial problem encoding to produce a final encoding that addresses the task. Our framework provides the terminology to specify the conditions under which a particular reformulation technique is applicable, thecost associated withperformingthereformulation, and the effects ofthe reformulation with respect to the problem encoding. As such it provides the vocabulary to characterize the selection of a sequence of reformulation techniques as a planning problem. Our framework is sufficiently flexible to accommodate previously proposed properties and metrics for reformulation. We have used the framework to characterize a variety ofreformulation techniques, three of which are presented in this paper. 1