A Temporal Layered Knowledge Architecture for an Evolving Structured Environment

In this paper a layered architecture is proposed for the representation of an environment that evolves in time. This proposal extends the Layered Knowledge Architecture in [4] and represents the environment by means of a taxonomy of layers. A particular hierarchical graph is defined whose nodes represent a portion of the environment and whose edges represent a path within the environment. Position and cost functions are defined for an efficient path planning. The proposed architecture is meant to represent and maintain the evolution of the described environment. The concept is defined of "significant change", i. e. a change which alters the cost functions more than a given rate. The idea is exploiting the topological structure of the graph and the consequence of a change on such structure. Necessary and sufficient conditions are stated that assure that a change is significant or not. If a change is significant, a new version of the environment description is produced.