Functional Specification of Probabilistic Process Models

Book One

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 20

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

Agents that handle complex processes evolving over a period of time need to be able to monitor the state of the process. Since the evolution of a process is often stochastic, this requires probabilistic monitoring of processes. A probabilistic process modeling language is needed that can adequately capture our uncertainty about the process execution. We present a language for describing probabilistic process models. This language is functional in nature, and the paper argues that a functional language provides a natural way to specify process models. %The paper presents the language features that allow the description of %processes that execute over time and processes with state. In our framework, processes have both states and values. Processes may execute sequentially or in parallel, and we describe two alternative forms of parallelism. An inference algorithm is presented that constructs a dynamic Bayesian network, containing a variable for every subprocess that is executed during the course of executing a process. We present a detailed example demonstrating the naturalness of the language.