The Logic of Dynamic Systems

Abstract

A formal theory of actions and change in dynamic systems is presented. Our formalism is based on the paradigm that state transitions in a system naturally occur while time passes by; one or more agents have the possibility to direct the development of the system by executing actions. Our theory covers concurrency of actions and events and includes a natural way to express delayed effects and nondeterminism. A uniform semantics for specifications of dynamic systems is developed, which enables us to express solutions to problems like temporal projection, planning and postdiction in terms of logical entailment. 1 Introduction A common assumption underlying most formal theories of actions, such as [ Gelfond and Lifschitz, 1993; Sandewall, 1994 ] , is that state transitions in dynamic systems only occur when some agent executes an action--- otherwise the state of the system is assumed to be stable. As pointed out for instance in [ Pollack, 1992 ] , this view is often too restrictive if on...