Deriving Procedural and Warning Instructions from Device and Environment Models

Abstract

This study is centred on the generation of instructions for household appliances. We show how knowledge about a device, together with knowledge about the environment, can be used for reasoning about instructions. The information communicated by the instructions can be planned from a version of the knowledge of the artifact and environment. We present the latter, which we call the {\it planning knowledge}, in the form of axioms in the {\it situation calculus}. This planning knowledge formally characterizes the behaviour of the artifact, and it is used to produce a basic plan of actions that the device and user take to accomplish a given goal. We explain how both procedural and warning instructions can be generated from this basic plan. In order to partially justify that instruction generation can be automated from a formal device design specification, we assume that the planning knowledge is {\it derivable\/} from the device and world knowledge.