We propose a theory for describing, reasoning about, and simulating transaction models that relax some of the ACID properties of classical transactions. Such models have been proposed for database applications involving long-lived, endless, and cooperative activities. Our approach appeals to non-Markovian theories, in which one may refer to past states other than the previous one. We illustrate...

Among the most frequent reasoning tasks in the situation calculus are projection queries that query the truth of conditions in a future state of affairs. However, in long running action sequences solving the projection problem is complex. The main contribution of this work is a new technique which allows the length of the action sequences to be reduced by reordering independent actions and remo...

A sound and complete approach for encoding the action description language A developed by M. Gelfond and V. Lifschitz in an equational logic program is given. Our results allow the comparison of the resource-oriented equational logic based approach and various other methods designed for reasoning about actions, most of them based on variants of the situation calculus, which were also related to...

We propose a theory for reasoning about actions based on order-sorted predicate logic where one can consider an elaborate taxonomy of objects. We are interested in the projection problem: whether a statement is true after executing a sequence of actions. To solve it we design a regression operator that takes advantage of well-sorted unification between terms. We show that answering projection q...

Knowledge, Belief, and Noisy Sensing in the Situation Calculus Patricio D. Simari Master of Science Graduate Department of Computer Science University of Toronto 2004 The extension to the situation calculus presented by Bacchus et al. formalizes the concept of noisy actions and shows how an agent can update its beliefs, which are modeled probabilistically, when relying on noisy sensors and effe...

In this paper we make a detailed comparison of the Situation Calculus and the Event Calculus, two logic-based temporal reasoning formalisms. We concentrate on diierences between the calculi, considering the similarities suuciently indicated in the recent literature. We illustrate the inability of Event Calculus to handle counterfactual reasoning problems, and that of Situation Calculus to deal ...

This paper presents our design and experiment of a computerassisted class laboratory on vectors in high-school. Our main goal is to improve the acquisition on notions by all pupils, from advanced level to remedial level. Our secondary goal is to improve the motivation of pupils toward maths and sciences. Our approach consists in making the pupils practice the notions included in a given set of ...

A formal framework for specifying and developing agents/robots must handle not only knowledge and sensing actions, but also time and concurrency. Researchers have extended the situation calculus to handle knowledge and sensing actions. Other researchers have addressed the issue of adding time and concurrent actions. Here both of these features are combined into a unified logical theory of knowl...

Software architecture constitutes the primary design of a software system. Consequently, architectural design decisions involved in architecture design have a key impact on the system in such aspects as future maintenance costs, resulting quality, and timeliness. However, the applied knowledge employed and the design decisions taken by soihvare architects are not explicitly represented in the d...