A narrative is a course of real events about which we might have incomplete information. Formalisms for reasoning about action may be broadly divided into those which are narrative-based, such as the Event Calculus of Kowalski and Sergot, and those which reason on the level of hypothetical sequences of actions, in particular the Situation Calculus. This paper bridges the gap between these types...

Concurrent events are treated merely by not forbidding them. Narrative is treated as a collection of situations and events and relations among them. Narrative is easier than planning, because it does not require that the effects of events be guaranteed. Prediction is harder than planning, because it requires that the actions be inferred from the motives of the actors.

We consider the problem of planning in complex domains where actions are stochastic, non-instantaneous, may occur concurrently, and time is represented explicitly. Our approach is based on the situation calculus based language Golog. Instead of general search for a sequence of actions, as in classical planning, we consider the problem of computing a deterministic, sequential program (with stoch...

The effectiveness of socio-technical approaches, such as the Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), to structure problematic situations is dependent on the candid communication of participants. This paper reports a pilot study using SSM to explore the challenges of establishing the Ideal Speech Situation in order to gain an understanding of the contradictory perceptions of graffiti. Through exploring ...

Pre-theoretically, we can conceive of syntactic optionality as a name for a situation in which different ways of saying what seems to be the same thing show a clear correspondence in form. Such a situation may or may not be problematic for a given syntactic theory. Classic transformational grammar of the sixties acknowledges syntactic optionality by introducing a distinction between obligatory ...

I present a language for specifying planning problems in which there are external events, that is, events beyond the direct control of the planner which may happen while a plan is being executed. The language is based on Miller and Shanahan’s representation of narratives in the situation calculus. I describe an implemented planner that produces correct plans for this language, and discuss how s...

Projection in the situation calculus refers to answering queries about the future evolutions of the modeled domain, while progression refers to updating the logical representation of the initial state so that it reflects the changes due to an executed action. In the general case projection is not decidable and progression may require second-order logic. In this paper we focus on a recent result...

Pervasive and autonomic systems rely on notions of context and situation to control their adaptation to changing user and system circumstances. Ensuring that a system exhibits the correct adaptation to on-going circumstances remains problematic, however, especially in the presence of dynamic user and device populations, changing requirements and complex interacting adaptations. We discuss the u...