Temporal reasoning in the situation calculus
Javier A. Pinto, Raymond Reiter · 1994
A fundamental problem in Knowledge Representation is the design of a logical language to express theories about actions and change. One of the most prominent proposals for such a language is John McCarthy's situation calculus, a formalism which views situations as branching towards the future. The situation calculus has been criticized for imposing severe representational limitations. For example, actions cannot be concurrent, properties change discretely, etc. In this thesis we show that many of these limitations can be overcome. Our work builds upon the discrete situation calculus and on Reiter's monotonic solution to the frame problem. A limitation of Reiter's approach is that it does not allow for state constraints. However, Lin and Reiter have made progress by providing a correctness criterion by which one can determine if an axiomatization can be said to solve the frame problem for theories that include state constraints.