In this invited lecture, I will present a logic-based approach to modeling and engineering processes that arose from work in AI. The approach is based on a logical framework for modeling dynamic domains called the Situation Calculus. It also uses a language called ConGolog for specifying complex processes on top of the Situation Calculus. By using such a logical framework we can provide clear f...

The ability to reason about action and change has long been considered a necessary component for any intelligent system. Many proposals have been offered in the past to deal with this problem. In this paper, we offer a new approach to belief change associated with performing actions that addresses some of the shortcomings of these approaches. In particular, our approach is based on a well-devel...

Nondeterminism is pervasive in all but the simplest action domains: an agent may flip a coin or pick up a different object than intended, or an action may fail and may fail in different ways. In this paper we provide a qualitative theory of nondeterminism. The account is based on an epistemic extension to the situation calculus that accommodates sensing actions. Our position is that nondetermin...

In order to make a robot execute a given task plan more robustly we want to enable it to take care of its self-maintenance requirements during online execution of this program. This requires the robot to know about the (internal) states of its components, constraints that restrict execution of certain actions and possibly also how to recover from faulty situations. The general idea is to implem...

As a contribution to the metatheory of reasoning about actions, we present some characteristics of the consistency of action theories. Three levels of consistency are investigated for the evaluation of action descriptions: uniform consistency, consistency of formulas and regional consistency. The first two provide an intuitive resolution of problems of explanation conflicts and fluent dependenc...

The paper shows the link that anchors a conceptual representation of dynamic scenarios to one of the most influential symbolic formalisms used in cognitive robotics, namely the situation calculus. A cognitive architecture for robot vision is taken into account as the reference framework. The discussion is based on an experimental setup aimed at obtaining an intelligent visual control of a robot...

GEAHS (Generic Educational Adaptive Hypermedia System) is a platform designed to ease the development of Adaptive Educational Hypermedia, using standard formalisms. In this document, we explain the underlying principles of this platform. Genericity is achieved thanks to an adaptation engine based on situation calculus and RDF. This paper describes the main aspects of our system, as well as the ...

By axiomatizing the semantics of Petri nets as a first-order (mostly) formal ontology called SCOPE, we propose in this paper a framework for the analysis of the structural and dynamical properties of Petri nets. More precisely, SCOPE is built as a Basic Action Theory in Reiter’s version of situation calculus. In addition, we show the satisfiability of SCOPE, by virtue of the Relative Satisfiabi...

This paper investigates the challenging problem of encoding the common sense knowledge involved in the manipulation of spatial objects from a reasoning about actions and change perspective. In particular, we propose a formal solution to a puzzle composed of non-trivial objects (such as holes and strings) assuming a version of the Situation Calculus written over first-order Equilibrium Logic, wh...

High-level robot controllers in realistic domains typically deal with processes which operate concurrently, change the world continuously, and where the execution of actions is event-driven as in “charge the batteries as soon as the voltage level is low”. While non-logicbased robot control languages are well suited to express such scenarios, they fare poorly when it comes to projecting, in a co...