Reasoning about Actions and Events in Situational Simulations

In this paper we have applied an interval representation of time to represent and reason about activities, events, actions and situations relevant to the construction domain. The first part of the paper formally defines the situational simulation environment and develops a set of temporal axioms which can be used to 1) Express precedence constraints between time intervals and 2) Capture the causal relationships between actions and events. The second part of the paper looks at an agent reasoning mechanism used to perceive and predict actions and foresee future consequences of present actions within the simulation environment. Agent reasoning is based on awareness derived from a knowledge base of facts which captures the causal nature of events in the construction management domain.