The concept of indirectness (using of tools) in automatic problem solving is investigated, and a formal approach is suggested within the framework of the Situation Calculus. The "Robot and Box" problem serves as an illustrative example throughout the paper.

The situation calculus is a logical formalism that has been extensively developed for planning. We apply the formalism in a complex multi-agent domain, modelled on the game of Clue. We find that the situation calculus, with suitable extensions, supplies a unified representation of (1) the interaction protocol, or structure of the game, (2) the dynamics of the knowledge and common knowledge of t...

Business Process Verification (BPV) works as one of the important functions in the emerging Business Process Management Systems. Current proposed approaches are not yet well applied because of the gap between formal models defined in the academia and informal models used in the industry. This paper attempts to propose a hybrid approach to solve this problem. XPDL will be used to describe busine...

Structural causal models offer a popular framework for exploring causal concepts. However, due to their limited expressiveness, structural models have difficulties coping with such concepts as actual (event-to-event) causation. In this paper, we propose a new type of causal model, based on embedding structural considerations in the language of situation calculus. By using situation calculus as ...

We add branching time to the linear discrete event calculus, which yields a formalism for commonsense reasoning that combines the benefits of the situation calculus and the event calculus. We characterize the precise relationship between the linear and branching versions of the discrete event calculus, and prove that a restricted version of the branching discrete event calculus is equivalent to...

When agents like mobile robots make observations while carrying out a course of actions, a formalization of the observed information is needed in order to reason about it. When doing so in the situation calculus, a seemingly straightforward approach turns out to be inappropriate since it leads to unintended results and has an unfortunate sensitivity with respect to different forms of successor ...

When reasoning about actions and sensors in realistic domains, the ability to cope with uncertainty often plays an essential role. Among the approaches dealing with uncertainty, the one by Bacchus, Halpern and Levesque, which uses the situation calculus, is perhaps the most expressive. However, there are still some open issues. For example, it remains unclear what an agent’s knowledge base woul...