An Abstract Machine for Reasoning about Situations, Actions, and Causality

Over the last years several new approaches for modeling situations, actions, and causality within a deductive framework were proposed. These new approaches treat the facts about a situation as resources, which are consumed and produced by actions. In this paper we extend one of these approaches, viz. an equational logic approach, by reifying actions to become resources as well. Using the concept of a membrane we show how abstractions and hierarchical planning can be modeled in such an equational logic. Moreover, we rigorously prove that the extended equational logic program can be mapped onto the so-called chemical abstract machine [1]. As this machine is a model for parallel processes this may lead to a parallel computational model for reasoning about situations, actions, and causality.