In the AAAI-97 paper by McCain and Turner, the frame problem is solved using a nonmonotonic causal logic. In this note we show how their method can be adapted to the language of the situation calculus. The \causal situation calculus" is applied to action domains involving ramiications and nondeterminism, and related to the causal formalization of actions proposed by Lin.

In the situation calculus, it is sometimes necessary to prove that certain properties are true in all world states accessible from the initial state. This is the case for some forms of reasoning about the physical world, for certain planning applications, and for verifying integrity constraints in databases. Not surprisingly, this requires a suitable form of mathematical induction. This paper m...

Actions depend crucially on what an agent knows and does not know. For example, an action may have a precondition that requires knowing the referent of a term, which is generally referred to as knowing who or knowing what. Alternatively, executing a sense action may be the result of realizing that the referent of a term is not known yet. The latter requires an agent to reason about all it knows...

Model sampling has proved to be a practically viable method for decision-making under uncertainty, for example in imperfect-information games with large state spaces. In this paper, we examine the logical foundations of sampling-based belief revision. We show that it satisfies six of the standard AGM postulates but not Vacuity nor Subexpansion. We provide a corresponding representation theorem ...

In this paper we describe a framework for reasoning about temporal explanation problems, which is based on our previous work on model-based diagnosis of dynamic systems. We use an explicit representation of qualitative temporal information which provides a simpler and more natural representation than the situation calculus. We show how to generate more specific explanations by instantiating exp...

Revision programs were introduced by Marek and Truszczynski to specify change in knowledge bases. In this paper we show how to embed revision programs in logic programs with situation calculus notation. We extend Marek and Truszczynski's approach to allow incomplete initial knowledge base and extend the rules of revision programs to depend both on the initial and the nal knowledge base. We show...

Most agents can acquire information about their environments as they operate. A good plan for such an agent is one that not only achieves the goal, but is also executable, i.e., ensures that the agent has enough information at every step to know what to do next. In this paper, we present a formal account of what it means for an agent to know how to execute a plan and to be able to achieve a goa...

The situation calculus is a popular formalism for reasoning about actions and change. Since the language is first-order, reasoning in the situation calculus is undecidable in general. An important question then is how to weaken reasoning in a principled way to guarantee decidability. Existing approaches either drastically limit the representation of the action theory or neglect important aspect...

This paper presents a system that controls the behavior of a mobile robot. The system is based on situation calculus, the initial state is described and a goal is given, Prolog produces an answer to this goal and we use an interface in Visual Basic to interpret the answer given by it. After of interpreting the given actions in response we send commands to the mobile robot through a serial port ...

In this paper we study the ramification problem in the setting of temporal databases. Standard solutions from the literature on reasoning about action are inadequate because they rely on the assumption that fluents persist, and because actions have effects on the next situation only. In this paper we provide a solution to the ramification problem based on an extension of the situation calculus ...