We present a formalization of the blocks world on the basis of the situation calculus and circumscription, and investigate its mathematical properties. The main theorem describes the eeect of the circumscription which solves the frame problem in the presence of ramiications. The theorem is quite general, in the sense that it is applicable not only to the blocks world, but to a whole class of do...

In this paper, to compare the situation calculus and event calculus we formulate both as logic programs and prove properties of these by reasoning with their completions augmented with induction. We thus show that the situation calculus and event calculus imply one another. Whereas our derivation of the event calculus from the situation calculus requires the use of induction, our derivation of ...

The problem of formalising continuous change within reasoning about action systems such as the situation calculus has recently been receiving increasing attention ((Rei96], MS96]). In this paper we show that a long-existing systems theoretic reasoning methodology, that of Zeigler's DEVS (discrete event system speciication), not only subsumes the standard situation calculus but is able to elegan...

In this paper we integrate a history{encoding based methodology developed by Chomicki for checking dynamic database integrity constraints into a situation-calculus based speciication of database updates as proposed by Reiter. By doing this, we are able to: (1) Answer queries about a whole hypothetical evolution of a database, without having to update the entire database and keep all the informa...

General action languages, like e.g. the Situation Calculus, use full classical logic to represent knowledge of actions and their effects in dynamic domains. Description Logics, on the other hand, have been developed to represent static knowledge with the help of decidable subsets of first order logic. In this paper, we show how to use Description Logic as the basis for a decidable yet still exp...

In this paper, we show decidabil i ty of a rather expressive fragment of the situation calculus. We allow second order quantif ication over finite and inf inite sets of situations. We do not impose a domain closure assumption on actions; therefore, infinite and even uncountable domains are allowed. The decision procedure is based on automata accepting infinite trees.

Using the situation calculus as underlying formalism for specifying database updates as proposed by Raymond Reiter, a semantical notion of relevance of entries in tables to other entries is introduced. Also a semantical notion of relevant action is provided. Some properties of these semantical notions are investigated. In particular, they are compared with syntactical deenitions of relevance th...

Approaches to reasoning about knowledge in imperfect information games typically involve an exhaustive description of the game, the dynamics characterized by a tree and the incompleteness in knowledge by information sets. Such specifications depend on a modeler’s intuition, are tedious to draft and vague on where the knowledge comes from. Also, formalisms proposed so far are essentially proposi...

In this paper, we investigate bounded action theories in the situation calculus. A bounded action theory is one which entails that, in every situation, the number of object tuples in the extension of fluents is bounded by a given constant, although such extensions are in general different across the infinitely many situations. We argue that such theories are common in applications, either becau...

We propose a framework for robot programming which allows the seamless integration of explicit agent programming with decision-theoretic planning. Specifically, the DTGolog model allows one to partially specify a control program in a highlevel, logical language, but also provides an interpreter that— given a logical axiomatization of a domain—will determine the optimal completion of that progra...