Structural causal models offer a popular framework for exploring causal concepts. However, due to their limited expressiveness, structural models have difficulties coping with such concepts as actual (event-to-event) causation. In this paper, we propose a new type of causal model, based on embedding structural considerations in the language of situation calculus. By using situation calculus as ...

We add branching time to the linear discrete event calculus, which yields a formalism for commonsense reasoning that combines the benefits of the situation calculus and the event calculus. We characterize the precise relationship between the linear and branching versions of the discrete event calculus, and prove that a restricted version of the branching discrete event calculus is equivalent to...

When agents like mobile robots make observations while carrying out a course of actions, a formalization of the observed information is needed in order to reason about it. When doing so in the situation calculus, a seemingly straightforward approach turns out to be inappropriate since it leads to unintended results and has an unfortunate sensitivity with respect to different forms of successor ...

When reasoning about actions and sensors in realistic domains, the ability to cope with uncertainty often plays an essential role. Among the approaches dealing with uncertainty, the one by Bacchus, Halpern and Levesque, which uses the situation calculus, is perhaps the most expressive. However, there are still some open issues. For example, it remains unclear what an agent’s knowledge base woul...

ion in Situation Calculus Action Theories Bita Banihashemi York University Toronto, Canada [email protected] Giuseppe De Giacomo Sapienza Università di Roma Roma, Italy [email protected] Yves Lespérance York University Toronto, Canada [email protected]

This article presents a situation calculus formalism featuring events as primary and the usual actions as a special case. Events that are not actions are called internal events and actions are called external events. The effects of both kinds of events are given by effect axioms of the usual kind. The actions are assumed to be performed by an agent as is usual in situation calculus. An internal...

Imposing a markovian condition on the situation calculus enables the embedding of situation calculus theories into the DEVS (discrete event system speciication) modelling and simulation framework. DEVS has an algebraic formalism relying on classical systems theory, and has been used to good eeect in practical domains. The demonstrated correspondence between the situation calculus and DEVS is ba...

We present a formal model of argumentation based on situation calculus which captures both the logical and the procedural aspects of argumentation processes. The logic is used to determine what is accepted by each agent participating in the discussion and by the group as a whole, on the basis of the speech acts performed during argumentation. Argumentation protocols, also called rules of order,...

We propose an agent based language, aimed at representing the epistemic states of users of interactive systems, with the goal to devise domain independent tools for building, updating and maintaining user models. The need of coping with change and update motivates the choice to deene our language within the Situation Calculus. We refer to a multi agent Situation Calculus with clusters of altern...

We investigate agent supervision, a form of customization, which constrains the actions of an agent so as to enforce certain desired behavioral specifications. This is done in a setting based on the Situation Calculus and a variant of the ConGolog programming language which allows for nondeterminism, but requires the remainder of a program after the execution of an action to be determined by th...