Reasoning About Action and Change

This chapter presents the state of research concerning the formalisation of an agent reasoning about a dynamic system which can be partially observed and acted upon. We first define the basic concepts of the area: system states, ontic and epistemic actions, observations; then the basic reasoning processes: prediction, progression, regression, postdiction, filtering, abduction, and extrapolation. We then recall the classical action representation problems and show how these problems are solved in some standard frameworks. For space reasons, we focus on these major settings: the situation calculus, STRIPS and some propositional action languages, dynamic logic, and dynamic Bayesian networks. We finally address a special case of progression, namely belief update.