Knowledge in Action: Logical Foundations for Specifying and Implementing Dynamical Systems

Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificialintelligence, robotics, software agents, simulation, decision and control theory, and many otherdisciplines. In recent years, a new approach to representing such systems, grounded in mathematicallogic, has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community.

Thisbook presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas, basing its theoretical and implementationfoundations on the situation calculus, a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework, itdevelops many features of dynamical systems modeling, including time, processes, concurrency,exogenous events, reactivity, sensing and knowledge, probabilistic uncertainty, and decision theory.It also describes and implements a new family of high-level programming languages suitable forwriting control programs for dynamical systems. Finally, it includes situation calculusspecifications for a wide range of examples drawn from cognitive robotics, planning, simulation,databases, and decision theory, together with all the implementation code for these examples. Thiscode is available on the book's Web site.

Raymond Reiter is Professor and Co-Director of the Cognitive Robotics Project in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.