Natural Actions, Concurrency and Continuous Time in the Situation Calculus

Our focus in this paper is on natural exoge-nous actions (Pinto 23]), namely those which occur in response to known laws of physics, like a ball bouncing at times determined by Newtonian equations of motion. The property of such actions that we wish to capture is that they must occur at their predicted times, provided no earlier actions (natural or agent initiated) prevent them from occurring. Because several such actions may occur simultaneously, we need a theory of concur-rency. Because such actions may be modeled by equations of motion, we need to represent continuous time. This paper shows how to gracefully accommodate all these features within the situation calculus, without sacri-cing the simple solution to the frame problem of Reiter 25]. One nice consequence of this approach is a situation calculus speci-cation of deductive planning, with continuous time and true concurrency, and where the agent can incorporate external natural event occurrences into her plans.

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