Exploiting a Relational DBMS for Reasoning about Actions

It is known that Reiter’s situation calculus basic action theories are tightly related to relational databases, when complete information on the initial situation is available. In particular the information on the initial situation can be seen as a relational database and action, as specified by the preconditions and successor state axioms can be seen as operations that change the state the the database. In this paper we show how to exploit such a correspondence to build a system for reasoning about actions based on standard relational database technology. In particular, by exploiting a relational DBMS, the system is able to perform both Projection and Progression in very large action theories. A prototype of the system described in the paper has been implemented, and is currently used to do experimentation on the actual capabilities of the approach.