agent

Class Action

java.lang.Object

agent.Action

Direct Known Subclasses:

Dropoff, Idle, Move, Pickup, Say

public abstract class Action
extends java.lang.Object

A abstract class for actions in an agent environment. Each type of action (an element of the set Ac) should be a separate subclass of this one.

Constructor Summary

Constructors

Constructor and Description
Action()

Method Summary

Modifier and Type	Method and Description
abstract State	execute(Agent a, State s) Return the State of the environment that results after Agent a executes the Action in State s.

Methods inherited from class java.lang.Object

clone, equals, finalize, getClass, hashCode, notify, notifyAll, toString, wait, wait, wait

Constructor Detail

Action

public Action()

Method Detail

execute

public abstract State execute(Agent a,
                              State s)

Return the State of the environment that results after Agent a executes the Action in State s. This reflects the state transformer function T:R^Ac -> 2^E for a specific action in Ac, with two caveats. First, if the action is nondeterministic, this method selects one of the resulting states. Second, if history is important, we assume that the state s contains all necessary history information. Note that in a multiagent environment, it is also important to know which agent is executing the action.

DESIGN NOTE: The choice to divide the state transformer into separate methods for each action is essentially one of modularity. We suggest that having each action "know" what its effects are is more natural than having the environment (or each state) know how states are changed by actions.