Queue reduction algorithm?

I have a queue of actions shared between clients, capturing user activity and being performed by a robot on another site. An example of an activity might look like this:

CREATE FOLDER  /docs
CREATE FILE    /docs/journal.txt
DELETE FILE    /docs/blog.txt
MOVE   FOLDER  /docs/images /docs/photos
...

Often there are actions that can be reduced to one or not. For instance:

CREATE FOLDER /docs
RENAME FOLDER /docs /documents

You can simply change to:

CREATE FOLDER /documents

And something like:

CREATE FOLDER /docs
RENAME FOLDER /documents
DELETE FOLDER /documents

Can be completely removed from the queue.

This kind of reduction / optimization seems to be a very common problem, and before the attack I would like to try some general solution. This is similar to a path search optimization problem.

Any ideas?