Reasoning About Actions: Non-Deterministic Effects, Constraints, and Qualification

Abstract

In this paper we propose the language of `state specifications' to uniformly specify effect of actions, executability condition of actions, and dynamic and static constraints. This language allows us to be able to express effects of action and constraints with same first order representation but different intuitive behavior to be specified differently. We then discuss how we can use state specifications to extend the action description languages A and L 0 . 1 Introduction and Motivation In this paper we consider several aspects of reasoning about actions: effects (direct, indirect, nondeterministic) of actions, qualification and executability of actions, constraints and their manifestations as ramifications and/or qualification, and propose a language that facilitates representing and reasoning about all of the above in a uniform manner. We follow the notation of situation calculus [ McCarthy and Hayes, 1969 ] and have three different sets of symbols, called fluents, action...