Knight, B., Peng, T. and Ma, J. (1998) Reasoning about change over time: Actions, events and their effects. In: Fourth Symposium on Logical Formalizations of Commonsense Reasoning (CS98), 7 - 9 January 1998, Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, UK.

Full text not available from this repository.

Abstract

This paper presents a new formalism for reasoning about change over time. The formalism derives a clean separation between the notion of states and situations. It allows more flexible temporal causal relationships than do other formalisms for reasoning about causal change, such as the situation calculus and the event calculus. It includes effects that start during, immediately after, or some time after their causes, and which end before, simultaneously with, or after their causes. A formal distinction between actions, action-types and events is proposed, which allows the expression of common-sense causal laws at high level. It is shown how these laws can be used to deduce state change over time at low level, when events occur under certain preconditions hold. Two problems that beset most interval-based temporal systems, i.e., the so-called dividing instant problem and intermingling problem, are absent from the formalism.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Paper)
Pre-2014 Departments:	School of Computing & Mathematical Sciences
Last Modified:	14 Oct 2016 08:59
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/244

Actions (login required)

View Item