Ultimately, any decision logic or structure we create for our agents comes down to deciding what action our agent should perform. Actions themselves are isolated structures that will be constructed from three distinct states:

The typical lifespan of an action begins in uninitialized state and will then become initialized through a onetime initialization, and then, it is considered to be running. After an action completes the running phase, it moves to a terminated state where cleanup is performed. Once the cleanup of an action has been completed, actions are once again set to uninitialized until they wait to be reactivated.

We'll start defining an action by declaring the three different states in which actions can be as well as a type specifier, so our data structures will know that a specific Lua table should be treated as an action.