Knowledge in Action

<b>Specifying and implementing dynamical systems with the situation calculus.</b><p>Modeling and implementing dynamical systems is a central problem in artificial intelligence robotics software agents simulation decision and control theory and many other disciplines. In recent years a new approach to representing such systems grounded in mathematical logic has been developed within the AI knowledge-representation community.</p><p>This book presents a comprehensive treatment of these ideas basing its theoretical and implementation foundations on the situation calculus a dialect of first-order logic. Within this framework it develops 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 for writing control programs for dynamical systems. Finally it includes situation calculus specifications 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. This code is available on the book's Web site.</p>