Action Languages, Temporal Action Logics and the Situation Calculus

In the rst part of the paper, we investigate the relationship between the action description language C and the situation calculus. Action description languages are based on the model of time that includes only two time instants: 0 for the beginning of the execution of an action and 1 for the end. The ontology of time in the situation calculus is much more elaborate. We show how to bridge the gap between these two ontologies by deening a translation from C into the situation calculus. The second part of the paper relates C to the formalism of temporal action logics (TAL) by showing how a fragment of C can be embedded into TAL.