AMS: a declarative formalism for hierarchical representation of procedural knowledge

This paper presents a domain-independent formalism, called Activity Manager System (AMS), for the explicit, hierarchical representation of procedural knowledge. The formalism is able to: (1) describe procedures at a reasonable level of complexity and completeness; (2) generate dynamically procedures at different levels of abstraction; (3) organize knowledge hierarchies by means of abstract entities; and (4) allow knowledge reusability at different levels of abstraction. AMS uses the notions of activity, activity network, state, and memory organization packet for activities (MOPA) to represent abstractions, and it allows the user to model an application in a hierarchical manner. The advantages and limitations of AMS are also discussed