Side-effect inspection for decision making

In order to decide on the course of action to take, one may need to check for side-effects of the possible available preferred actions. In the context of abduction in Logic Programs, abducible literals may represent actions and assumptions in the declarative rules used to represent our knowledge about the world. Besides finding out which alternative sets of actions achieve the desired goals, it may be of interest to identify which of those abductive solutions would also render true side-effect literals relevant for the decision making process at hand, and which would render those side-effects false. After collecting all the alternative abductive solutions for achieving the goals it is possible to identify which particular actions influence inspected side-effect literals' truth-value. To achieve this, we present the concept of Inspection Point in Abductive Logic Programs, and show how, by means of examples, one can employ it to investigate side-effects of interest (the inspection points) in order to help evaluate and decide among abductive solutions. We show how this type of reasoning requires a new mechanism, not provided by others already available. We furthermore show how to implement this new mechanism it on top of an already existing abduction solving system - ABDUAL - in a way that can be adopted by other systems too.