Open the Chests: An Environment for Activity Recognition and Sequential Decision Problems Using Temporal Logic

This article presents Open the Chests, a novel benchmark environment designed for simulating and testing activity recognition and reactive decision-making algorithms. By leveraging temporal logic, Open the Chests offers a dynamic, event-driven simulation platform that illustrates the complexities of real-world systems. The environment contains multiple chests, each representing an activity pattern that an interacting agent must identify and respond to by pressing a corresponding button. The agent must analyze sequences of asynchronous events generated by the environment to recognize these patterns and make informed decisions. With the aim of theoretically grounding the environment, the Activity-Based Markov Decision Process (AB-MDP) is defined, allowing to model the context-dependent interaction with activities. Our goal is to propose a robust tool for the development, testing, and bench-marking of algorithms that is illustrative of realistic scenarios and allows for the isolation of specific complexities in event-driven environments.