A unifying action calculus

Abstract McCarthy’s Situation Calculus is arguably the oldest special-purpose knowledge representation formalism, designed to axiomatize knowledge of actions and their effects. Four decades of research in this area has led to a variety of alternative formalisms: While some approaches can be considered instances or extensions of the classical Situation Calculus, like Reiter’s successor state axioms or the Fluent Calculus, there also exist special planning languages like ADL and approaches based on a linear (rather than branching) time structure like the Event Calculus. The co-existence of many different calculi has two main disadvantages: The formal relations among them is a largely open issue, and a lot of today’s research concerns the transfer of specific results obtained for one approach to another one. In this paper, we present a unifying action calculus, of which we show that it encompasses (well-defined classes of) all of the aforementioned formalisms. Our calculus not o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: AI
• Authors: Michael Thielscher
• Keywords: AI 2011, Artificial Intelligence, Calculus, Classical Situation Calculus, Unifying Action Calculus