Description
Book SynopsisTechniques for reasoning about actions an change in the physical world is one of the classical research topics in artificial intelligence. It is motivated by the needs of autonomous robots which must be able to anticipate their immediate future, to plan their future actions, and to figure out what went wrong in case of problems. It is also motivated by the needs of common-sense reasoning for example in the understanding of natural language texts, where processes and change over time is an ever-present phenomenon. The same set of problems arises in several other areas of computing such as in conceptual modelling for data bases, and in the rapidly growing area of intelligent control.The present research monograph presents and uses a novel methodology for reasoning about actions and change. Traditional research contributions have proposed new logic variants which were only supported by episodical examples. THe work described here uses a systematic methodology for identifying the exact ran
Trade ReviewThe book presents deep and serious insight into inert and inhabited dynamical systems (IDS). * Zentralblatt fur Mathematik *
Those working in nonmonotonic reasoning, planning, temporal logic, reasoning about actions and change, and related areas will find this book worth reading. * Computing Reviews *
Table of ContentsInert and inhabited dynamical systems ; Inference operations on scenario descriptions ; Underlying semantics for IDS worlds ; Elementary feature logic and meta-logical concepts ; Lexical-domain object-feature logic ; Temporal feature logic for discrete time domains ; Chronicle completion in k-IA ; Intended models for chronicles in k-IA ; Entailment methods for k-IA using DFL-1 ; Duration constraints ; Entailment methods for k-OA using occlusion ; Composite actions ; Upper applicability bounds and assessment of soundness ; Future directions ; Terms index ; Notation ; References to related work
