Deductive efficiency, belief revision and acting

The SNePS inference engine is optimized for deductive efficiency, i.e. all beliefs acquired via inference are added to the agent’s beliefs so that future queries may be answered by a retrieval rather than rederivation. An assumption-based truth maintenance system keeps track of the derivation histories of derived beliefs. We show how such an architecture simplifies the ontology of propositional representations of plans; acts; preconditions, and effects of actions. In addition, the deductive efficiency of the basic system automatically extends itself to efficient search of plans, and hierarchical plan decompositions.